Insomniactive

The smarties speak! First, David Swensen, long-time manager of the Yale Endowment, the author of Pioneering Portfolio Management, and a personal hero. In the NYT:

As newspapers go digital, their business model erodes. A 2008 research report from Sanford C. Bernstein & Company explained, “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”

Then my friend Steve Coll, former WaPo managing editor and the author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens:

In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so.

Yes, the dispersal of publishing through digital technology is itself a source of constitutional renewal, and already small digital publishers are proving through their enterprise and investigative reporting that the values underlying the old models will not disappear. Yes, my thinking is admittedly rooted in an aging generation’s experience. Still, there is just no substitute for the professional, civil-service-style, relentless independent thinking, reporting, and observation that developed in big newsrooms between the Second World War and whenever it was that the end began—about 2005 or so. And those qualities arose from the scale of those newsrooms, and the way the quasi-monopoly business model and high-quality family owners shielded them from political or commercial pressure—not perfectly, but largely. Yes, the big papers failed, as in the run-up to the Iraq war, but they succeeded much more often. They practiced a kind of journalism that, on the whole, was better for a democratic constitutional system than any journalism ever practiced before, anywhere. So sayeth me, at any rate.

Romanesko publishes a memo mandating a 12-month salary freeze, begging for employees to take time off or just leave for a year, and outlining substantial content consolidation and newshole reductions. Oy.

From my friend Ross Ramsey, Grand Potentate of Texas Weekly, this new find. NewsTechZilla is written and produced by a couple of guys who are obviously smart and passionate about the news. Its lead post today is a nice meditation on the shrinking “unit of work” in news collection, and how disconnected this is from larger questions of revenue. My favorite soundbite: “if you can’t sell ads, it doesn’t matter how cheaply you can produce the news.”

Check it out.

In the “It’s always darkest just before it’s pitch-f*&^ing black” category, the latest and most indiscriminate round of cuts at the NYT-owned Boston Globe:

The Boston Globe, grappling with the economic downturn and financial pressures affecting the newspaper industry, yesterday said it plans to cut its newsroom payroll by as many as 50 full-time jobs, a reduction of nearly 12 percent in the company’s news and editorial staff.

All of the company’s 379 full-time news employees, including those at the Boston.com website, will be offered buyouts in coming weeks. If the company can’t meet its target through voluntary departures, it said it would resort to layoffs of union and management employees.

This will be the fifth newsroom staff reduction since 2001, as the Globe, like newspapers everywhere, struggles with the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet, consolidation of the retail industry, and a recession forecast to be the deepest in decades.

The latest buyout program differs from previous ones in several ways. It’s the first newsroom-only buyout in recent memory. It covers 350 newsroom and editorial employees and 29 news employees of Boston.com, who were exempt in the past. And, all news and editorial employees — even those with fewer than five years at the company — will be eligible to apply.

The news operation also has 54 full-time equivalent jobs held by part-timers, who aren’t eligible for the buyout but could be included in layoffs. At its peak in 2000, the Globe newsroom had 552 full-time jobs. That didn’t include Boston.com, which then was operated separately.