73 soon-to-be ex-AJC’ers can’t be wrong
August 1, 2008 at 1:01 pm by Scott Henry in NewsIn deference to the obsolete “inverted pyramid” style of news writing that all veteran journalists grew up with, I’ll start with the lede: 73 reporters, editors and other newsroom personnel at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution applied for the paper’s most recent buyout offer and all 73 were accepted.
We’re told the mood is pretty upbeat right now over at the Grey Lady of Marietta Street following a memo this morning from editor Julia Wallace announcing that, because the company’s workforce-reduction target was met, there’s no need for layoffs.
Understandably, the potential of a layoff had been a Sword of Damocles hanging over the newsroom for the past couple of weeks. The paper’s brass had said they wanted to shave the news staff by 58 – and only 58. Would enough people take the buyout?
We’d reported that business desk veteran Bill Hendrick and longtime business columnist Maria Saporta were early takers of the buyout, which offered two weeks of salary and benefits for every year of AJC employment. But it wasn’t until just before noon that AJC rank and file learned the good news that the staff-cutting is over – for now.
In fact, we’ve heard – although not had the opportunity to confirm – that some staffers might have been so worried about the prospect of being laid off that they applied for the buyout even though they didn’t want to leave the paper.
Wallace’s brief memo doesn’t explain why the honchos changed their minds and decided to let an extra 15 people go, but the safe guess is that they figured it would help postpone future trimming of the payroll. For the time being, the AJC will make do with a 335-member newsroom, down from a high point of nearly 500 before last summer’s buyout.
We’ll post more names of departing AJCers as we learn them. Feel free to share what you know.
(An earlier version of this post contained a stupid, brain-fart error of terminology brought to my attention by the first comment. Thanks.)
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August 1st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Make that the “inverted pyramid,” obsolete or not.
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
“We’re told the mood is pretty upbeat right now over at the Grey Lady of Marietta Street following a memo this morning from editor Julia Wallace announcing that, because the company’s workforce-reduction target was met, there’s no need for layoffs.”
I wonder how upbeat it will be in a couple of months when the next round of layoffs come due. In a year or so, the AJC will be written and published either by journalist robots or minimum wage earners in Bombay, India.