Tsuris of "The Times"

Talent takes buyouts, deadbeats stay? Not what Pinch and Keller envisioned, presumably but one would hope they at least would have taken buyouts.

The problem with buyouts is that you can't choose who leaves. So when New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced to the staff on February 28 that the paper would be mailing out buyout packages to every non-guild employee in the newsroom, it was hoped that some of the paper’s more redundant staffers might self-select. “There’s so much deadwood at the paper, and everyone knows it,” says one former Times reporter. “There are editors who basically do nothing and writers who write 30 pieces a year.”

Linda Greenhouse, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Supreme Court reporter, is not one of those. She has been tirelessly covering that beat for three decades, and although she has received her share of criticism (a speech she made at Harvard in 2006 slamming the Bush administration was perceived as crossing the line by the Times’ critics, some of its reporters, and even its public editor), she is widely considered to be in the handful of the paper's elite reporters (“The queen bee of Supreme Court reporters,” the Columbia Journalism Review called her.)

So when she announced that she had accepted the offer, there was some consternation. Could this herald a brain and talent drain at the paper of record? The buyouts were meant to keep Keller from laying off as many as a hundred news staffers, but as one veteran Times reporter says, “If they’re going to give people buyouts, they’re going to lose some Linda Greenhouses."

Link.