The thing that scares me is that every empty desk represents two or three stories per week that won't get reported, and at least one per week in which someone will swindle, rip-off, injure or abuse someone else and the wrongdoer won't be exposed.
Not to mention all the stories of the good things that happen day in and day out in Silicon Valley that also won't get their proper notoriety.
Meanwhile, a former teacher of mine got feisty about the whole to-do:
Just last week I was privileged to briefly visit the newsroom at the San Jose Mercury News, a paper that has embraced the buyout mania even more than the Washington Post or New York Times. The newsroom staff has been reduced by half in the past few years, and everyone agrees it's been an enormous benefit. The paper no longer worries about covering lots of pesky stories that once seemed to take endless time and energy and threatened its readers with information overload. Gone, too, is the anxiety year after year of trying to make the Top 10 list of great American newspapers. And no more over-editing! The enhanced oxygen supply in a half-empty newsroom, the spaciousness and the blessed silence reminded me of the peace and tranquility I found in abandoned villages in Kurdistan in 1991 after the Iraqi army had passed through during its own special buy-out program.
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