FROM: (Insert name of your managing editor)
RE: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Layoffs
TO: Staff of (insert name of your newspaper)
This morning, I am announcing an implosion (oops, I mean) a reorganization of our newsroom staff in an effort to stave off bankruptcy (I mean) increase web readership. This is an exciting time for our newspaper, a time requiring our gifted and talented staff to exhibit the teamwork that has made our paper one of the most unprofitable (oops, I mean) most innovative in the business. You are all valuable members of this team.
So it gives me great pleasure to announce that we will fire most of the newsroom, effective Father's Day.
As part of this exciting reorganization, we will immediately dispense with traditional newsroom beats. We’re not doing this because we desperately need to reduce our staff within two weeks or face the repossession of our fleet of delivery vehicles. We would have fired these staffers even if our profit margin hadn’t dipped last month to a level that can best be described as “the unhappy side of cataclysmic.” We might even have fired them if our circulation hadn’t plummeted so low that our Sunday edition is now produced on a mimeograph machine in a retired high school English teacher’s garage.
We are firing you all because the traditional newspaper model is no longer relevant to the lives of our reader (I mean) readers. Take the cop beat, for example, and the story on this morning’s front page about the 53 Boy Scouts hacked to death by the disgruntled Eagle Scout. Now, I’m sure the Eagle Scouts among us are transfixed by the killer’s frustrations with his inability to gain a merit badge in oyster shucking. But it is news reporting about just this sort of inside baseball that lead our readers to ask, “If I read this story, how much time will I have left in my incredibly busy life to go online to search for porn?”
So we’re firing our cops reporters and replacing them with Igor, an unemployed Ukrainian podiatrist who will work out of our new Odessa bureau. Working a computer from the front room of his doublewide on the shores of the Black Sea, Igor will diligently update the web regularly with relevant breaking news from our community. In the Internet age, reporters need not be physically present to cover the events of the day. In fact, given the crushing hours that our surviving reporters will be required to work in our new web-centric paper, we will increasingly base reporters in locales not subject to U.S. labor law or the more-nettlesome tenets of the Geneva Convention (See separate memo on the opening of our new Guantanamo Bureau). Igor will make cop checks via telepathy and report the news he thinks is happening, subject, of course, to all applicable ethical guidelines that make our paper a bastion of trustworthiness. We’re not doing this to save money or because Igor will work for pennies a day or because Igor’s vision of profit sharing is a fifth of vodka swapped between dazed colleagues. We’re doing it because we in management hear disembodied voices that direct our actions. We must obey.
From now on, “beat” is just another four-letter word. After we rip them from you like bottles out of the mouths of babes, we will divide the newsroom into seven reporting “teams.” Admittedly, we use the word “team” somewhat loosely, owing to the fact that mass firings will necessitate that six of the seven will be staffed entirely by rhesus monkeys trained in the journalistic arts. Of course, these monkeys will earn considerably less than union scale, though they are not being hired as a cost-saving measure. Monkeys are natural storytellers who can lead our newspaper into the digital age. We would have hired them even if we weren’t hemorrhaging cash so quickly that key newsroom leaders will soon be asked to rob pizzerias to supplement our fiscal 2008 budget. (We are accepting applications to our new Pizza Team and see this as a growth area in our diversified business plan.)
As we move toward layoffs, we regrettably must fire those reporters with the most experience. We aren’t doing this to rid the newsroom of bloated salaries that we are unable to unilaterally cut due to unreasonable, Paleolithic union rules that rob management of all flexibility as we adjust to Armageddon (dang! I mean) a rapidly changing newspaper market. We’re doing this because older reporters don’t work well with rhesus monkeys. Science proves this.
Now, we understand that some of you may question the need to fire Biff Bifferton, our intrepid investigative reporter of the last 23 years. Some of the more anal among you will undoubtedly point out that Biff spent nine years in a Turkish prison after refusing to divulge a confidential source in his Pulitzer Prize-winning project. Yes, who could forget that this series led to the simultaneous resignation of our congressional delegation, the abdication of the king of Sweden and free prosthetic limbs for 341 crippled children. Others might even recall the way Biff repeatedly ran into a burning building to rescue our entire A Rim copy desk during the Newsroom Conflagration of ’87. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that Biff saved me from a horrific death with a timely application of the Heimlich Maneuver during a memorable performance evaluation last summer.
But this reorganization forces us to reevaluate old skill sets that just aren’t relevant in the digital age. While we appreciate Biff’s contributions through the years, the type of non-visual, word-reliant, overly complicated public service journalism that has made him a beacon of hope for the poor and dispossessed no longer fits in with the innovative, graphics-happy, web-based journalism we now favor. Remember: We don’t write stories to win awards. We write stories to make readers giggle like drunken sailors at a wet t-shirt competition.
So after the publication tomorrow of Biff’s expose regarding the military’s plutonium experiments on orphans and Golden Retriever puppies, we must bid him “adieu.” Good bye and good luck, Biffster!
But no worries! We will not diminish our commitment to the finest investigative reporting this side of Guatemala . In fact, we are expanding our Investigations Team from four to 10 reporters, a majority of whom will not be primates. We will call this new, revitalized team our Investigative Interns Squad, and it will be composed of students at some of the most-prestigious community colleges in Malaysia . Team members are free to undertake any major investigation in the hours they aren’t maintaining our new Malaysian call center.
We also are offering a voluntary separation program for many veteran staffers, allowing us to clear as if with a neutron bomb (fuck! I mean) to reorganize the newsroom to prevent even more firings. Terms are nonnegotiable generous. We will offer one week’s pay for every six months of service, maximum one week’s pay. These employees will be allowed to keep any unused notebooks in their possession at the time they are escorted out of the building by burly, armed security personnel with instructions to maim anyone who attempts to mess with the monkeys (oops, I mean) to a fruitful retirement. And even more graciously, we are offering free foot care for any terminated employee who can make it to Odessa before the end of the year. (One bottle of vodka will serve as a co-pay.)
We are instituting other cost-saving measures, otherwise it would be necessary to hire even more monkeys. With the continuing rise of health care expenses, it is necessary for the company to find more creative ways to maintain the health of our work force. So beginning Jan. 1, the company will offer low-interest loans for any staffer seeking to visit his or her primary care physician twice during any calendar year. While the medical plan will no longer cover hospitalization, surgery, x-rays, splints, stitches, aspirin, emergency care or the diagnosis and care of any tropical disease resulting in greenish, oozing blisters on the buttocks, we are happy to report that the network of participating physicians has been expanded to include most of Malaysia . We, of course, encourage all employees to regularly visit their village shaman for a therapeutic blood letting to ward off evil spirits before maladies escalate and result in lost time at work.
In addition, our travel budget will be vaporized (oops, I mean)slightly adjusted. Reporters will still be allowed to travel to distant locales to report the stories that have distinguished our newspaper for the last century. But they will no longer be allowed to return. Merit pay raises are being replaced by effusive praise and high-protein monkey chow. And finally, to reduce newsprint costs, we are eliminating our daily financial section and will print stock listings on the foreheads of business staffers, who will be asked to begin their day standing at major intersections in the greater metro area.
We are living through the death of our industry (oops, I mean) a media revolution. I know change is scary. I’m scared, too. See my goose bumps? It’s not easy to fire you. Sometimes, you can be difficult, and most of you are always whining. Firing you gives me a headache. It’s stressful and takes valuable time away from grooming the monkeys. We in management realize that when we fire you, you have a better chance of being appointed the ambassador of Uruguay than of finding another job in the newspaper industry. But once you’re fired and you wrap a blanket of newspapers around your homeless body as protection from the cold, we’re sure you’ll be pleased with our new, revitalized product. And we’re absolutely confident that, as a reader, the newspaper will once again be relevant to your life.
