Jolting news out of The Washington Post this week.

Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sent out a memo to staff on Tuesday announcing plans to offer voluntary buyouts, in hopes of reducing its staff by 240. The Post has approximately 2,500 employees.

A meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday to go over the buyouts, and to announce which employees and departments are eligible.

In the note, Stonesifer called it “difficult news” and wrote, “To be clear, we designed this program to reduce our workforce by approximately 240 employees in the hopes of averting more difficult actions such as layoffs — a situation we are united in trying to avoid.”

The plan is that the Post will cap the number of acceptances at 240. But what happens if 240 people don’t volunteer? Stonesifer’s note said the Post hopes to avert layoffs, but the note did not make any promises. She wrote, “… we are working to find ways to return our business to a healthier place in the coming year.”

The Post’s Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported that Stonesifer said subscription, traffic and advertising projections over the past two years had been “overly optimistic.”

In August 2022, The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson wrote, “The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.”

The Times reported at the time that the Post was on track to lose money in 2022 after years of making money. Again, this was a year ago and, apparently, the situation hasn’t gotten sunnier. Last January, the Post reduced staff by approximately 50, including 20 layoffs.

Mullin and Robertson wrote another story this past July that the Post was on track to lose $100 million this year.

Still, the Post’s Sommer and Izadi wrote Tuesday that the memo announcing buyout offers “caught staffers off guard.” They wrote, “The announcement Tuesday is reminiscent of the way The Post handled staff reductions in a bygone era, through the rounds of voluntary buyouts that became a hallmark of the years before Bezos’s purchase of The Post in 2013.”

Company spokesperson Kathy Baird told the Post that the buyouts should put the Post “in a strong place for 2024 and beyond.” But, she added, “this decision is still difficult knowing some of our valued colleagues may choose to leave at the end of the year.”

The little we know about Marty Baron

For this item, I turn it over to Poynter media business analyst Rick Edmonds.

Marty Baron is famous for, among other things, revealing very little of himself personally to the journalists who work with him. His freshly released book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post,” is true to form.

When the Amazon delivery man knocked on the door Sunday with my copy, I flipped right to the index. Sure enough, Baron, now 68 and retired as the Post’s executive editor, offered exactly two such nuggets in a 478-page narrative.

On page 2, he describes himself physically as having “a trimmed beard, wooly head of hair, and what was invariably described as my dour and taciturn demeanor.” Pretty much what the actor Liev Schreiber uncannily embodied in “Spotlight,” the movie about The Boston Globe’s expose of pedophile priests.

Late in the book, Baron writes that his decision to retire was influenced by a rare medical condition. It caused nosebleeds so severe that on a number of days he needed to stay home and twice went to the emergency room.

Fortunately, some of the blanks are filled in an excellent profile by a former Boston Globe colleague, Mark Shanahan, titled “The Inscrutable Marty Baron.” In a nearly three-hour interview, he didn’t extract zingy self-examination, but he did harvest telling anecdotes from friends and co-workers.

Shanahan leads with one of those — Baron garishly dressed at a Halloween party at an alt-rock venue, dancing the Electric Slide. A photo exists, Shanahan said, but no one would share it with him.

The profile includes a story of Baron reading rejection letters from Princeton, Amherst and Williams in a speech at his former high school. At a memorable dinner in Boston, after Baron had hired me to do a news staff seminar on math, he told me the expanded version of his Princeton experience. He was disappointed and indignant but didn’t stop at that. He wrote and called the admissions dean, arguing that they had it wrong and should reconsider. Thirty years later, Baron still held a grudge.

(He went to Lehigh as an undergraduate, earned an MBA there, and obviously has done just fine.)

Such tenaciousness and self-confidence have served Baron well as the editor in charge of huge stories, including Donald Trump’s election and four-year term. I’d like to know more about his own view of how he became one of the master editors of his generation. He has offered a few sound truisms like demanding more and more reporting.

I am not looking for Baron to write that book, part how-to, part memoir. It will probably take another author willing to report, report, report and then report some more.

Notable coverage from Israel and the Gaza Strip

Israelis inspect the rubble of a building a day after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip this week. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

More and more heartbreaking and bleak stories are coming out of Israel and Gaza as the war rages on. Tuesday brought incredibly disturbing and depressing reports.

The story continues to change by the minute, but here is some of the more notable coverage from the past 24 hours:

• The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner and photographer Sergey Ponomarev reported from Kfar Azza, near the Israeli border with Gaza: “‘It’s Not a War or a Battlefield. It’s a Massacre.’”
• Some might find this disturbing. A New York Times visual investigation from Alexander Cardia, Dmitriy Khavin and David Blumenfeld: “‘Everyone Died’: How Gunmen Killed Dozens In Sderot.”
• The Washington Post’s Samuel Granados, Ruby Mellen, Lauren Tierney, Artur Galocha, Cate Brown and Aaron Steckelberg with “How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wall.’”
• Vox’s Ellen Ioanes, Jonathan Guyer and Zack Beauchamp with “7 big questions about the Israel-Hamas war, answered.”
• Mediaite’s Jamie Frevele with “Anderson Cooper Struggles to Speak After Israeli Woman Makes Harrowing Plea For Kidnapped Family.”
• CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “‘You are in the line of fire’: What it’s like to be an Israeli reporter covering the unfolding war.”
• The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum with “There Are No Rules.”

Good journalism news … for now

The New York Times v. Sullivan is one of the most important legal cases for journalism. The landmark 1964 case created a higher bar for public figures to claim libel in civil suits. That ruling stated public figures must show “actual malice” to be successful in libel cases.

In the past couple of years, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have pushed the idea of reconsidering the Sullivan case.

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case that could’ve revisited Sullivan. Thomas, however, repeated his desire to reconsider the landmark case at some point. Thomas wrote, “In an appropriate case, however, we should reconsider New York Times and our other decisions displacing state defamation law.”

Thomas said the case on Tuesday — Don Blankenship v. NBC Universal, LLC — wasn’t the right case to test Sullivan.

Blankenship, a coal mine executive, was in charge of a mine where a 2010 explosion killed 29. He was found guilty of conspiring to violate safety standards and sentenced to a year in prison — one day less than a felony sentence. When he tried to run for a U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia in 2018, many media outlets mistakenly reported he was a convicted felon, even though he was officially convicted of a misdemeanor. Blankenship sued many media organizations, but the lower courts said the news outlets did not make their statements with actual malice.

Evan Gershkovich update

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the Moscow City Court in Moscow on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Not surprising, but nonetheless disappointing: A Russian court upheld the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested and jailed in March on charges of espionage. The Journal and U.S. government have vehemently denied Gershkovich is a spy, and the U.S. considers him “wrongfully detained.”

A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, told the Wall Street Journal’s Ann M. Simmons in a statement, “It has now been more than six months since Evan’s unjust arrest, and we are outraged that he continues to be wrongfully detained. The accusation against him is categorically false, and we call for his immediate release.”

Simmons wrote, “Legal experts say it could be many months before Gershkovich’s case is brought to trial. Russian authorities haven’t publicly provided evidence to support the allegation. Under Russian law, investigators and prosecutors have wide latitude to request further extensions of pretrial detention. Espionage trials are typically conducted in secret and conviction could carry a prison sentence of 10 to 20 years. It is rare for a court to acquit a defendant.”

Gershkovich likely is being used as a pawn.

Veep

Interesting: Two major publications published big stories on Tuesday about Vice President Kamala Harris.

The New York Times’ Astead W. Herndon wrote, “In Search of Kamala Harris.” And The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro wrote, “The Kamala Harris Problem.”

With 13 months before the 2024 election, could this be a reset of Harris’  reputation that, for some, suggests she isn’t ready to be president should she be called upon?

Herndon wrote, “In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism. This year, an NBC News poll found that 49 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, with the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president since the poll began in 1989.”

Both deeply reported pieces look into Harris’ time as VP and allow her to make her case for her role moving forward. It’s too deep and nuanced to recap in a few sentences here, so I encourage you to read them both.

Media tidbits

• Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton with “Elon Musk took the headlines away from Twitter — but you can bring them back with this one weird trick.”
• Axios’ Sara Fischer with “Jellysmack acquires Law&Crime Network.”
• Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple with “Why the New York Times is looking to shorten stories.”
• Digiday’s Sara Guaglione with “‘What a bozo move’: Publishers react to X update removing headlines from posts.”
• ESPN hockey commentator Barry Melrose is stepping away from his job at ESPN after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. ESPN’s John Buccigross announced the news on X. After coaching in the NHL, Melrose joined ESPN full time in 1996. He stayed there until a brief stint coaching the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2008. He rejoined ESPN in 2009. He and ESPN’s Steve Levy have reported from the Stanley Cup finals together every year since 1994.

Hot type

• More powerful work from The Washington Post about guns and children. Robert Klemko, John Woodrow Cox, Lizzie Johnson and Steven Rich with “Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring.”
• ProPublica’s Jeremy Kohler and the Riverfront Times’ Ryan Krull with “A Detective Sabotaged His Own Cases Because He Didn’t Like the Prosecutor. The Police Department Did Nothing to Stop Him.”
• This story is behind a paywall, but for those with a Rolling Stone subscription: Angie Martoccio with “One Great Rock Movie Can Change the World: An Oral History of ‘School of Rock.’”

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