This blogger hopes the Newseum will offer free admission (or at least a big discount) to the thousands of American journalists who have been fired, downsized or “bought out” by profit margin-obsessed management. The $20 admission ticket is pretty pricey for a laid-off reporter.
The Newseum’s hometown paper, Washington Post, could get the ball rolling, establishing a fund to subsidize admission for former journalists. Washington Post Co. CEO Donald Graham is surely doing his part to trim the ranks of journalism.
More than 110 staffers at Newsweek took a buyout offer from Washingon Post Co. last week. Radaronline reports that Newsweek is losing some of its “best-known, most-admired and longest service critics including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan."
Top political writer Howard Fineman was offered the buyout, but refused because he just turned 50 and was barely eligible for the buyout terms. Newsweek's future looks dicey as 111 of the 145 staffers offered the buyout, grabbed it.
Radar frets that the mass departure of talent means “the loss of the magazine’s institutional memory.”
That’s apparently not a worry to Graham who is busy re-branding his company as an educational outfit that is powered by the earnings of the Kaplan test-giving and training outfit.
That's a loss of institutional memory on a grand scale.