The staff-wide e-mails have arrived in bunches over the last few days at the Los Angeles Times.
From Glenn Bunting, the dogged investigative reporter who exposed illegal foreign fundraising by President Clinton's reelection campaign, "Farewell. It's been a terrific adventure." From Bob Sipchen, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and "School Me" columnist: "It's been splendid my brothers and sisters." And from Solomon Moore, who went to Iraq and helped uncover the ties between official security forces and sectarian death squads: "Peace out."
The great majority of the 60 departing Times journalists made their exits this week from the downtown L.A. headquarters once known as Times Mirror Square. They wrote and edited their final stories. They packed decades' worth of files into cardboard boxes in an exodus that has become painfully routine in the newspaper business of late.
The San Francisco Chronicle announced last week that it would reduce its news staff by a quarter. Reports circulated Friday that the once-robust San Jose Mercury News would pare its staff again. At The Times, the latest departures will leave the paper's news staff at roughly 850 people, about three-quarters of its peak.
"We all are caught in the greatest upheaval our industry and the institution of journalism has ever faced," Chronicle Managing Editor Robert Rosenthal told the newsroom this week as he tendered his own resignation.
The journalists remaining at The Times found some consolation in the knowledge that the news staff will continue to be the second-largest in America (behind the New York Times), with bureaus around the nation and in 18 foreign countries.
"You can look at this as a bad time, because there is no doubt that newspapers are going through wrenching changes," Times Editor James E. O'Shea said in an interview. "But ... there are still a lot of great people here and a lot of great work that can be done."
Publisher David D. Hiller ordered the reductions in an effort to prop up The Times' profit at a time when many advertisers are leaving newspapers to chase consumers onto the Internet. The vast majority of the cuts were achieved through voluntary separations and will save a little more than $5 million a year from the more-than-$100-million newsroom budget.
The Times and other newspapers were created to fasten their gaze on the outside world, not on themselves. But the paper's operations became a national issue last year, when the publisher and editor left in a protest over staff cuts.
