Media General, the company that sold 63 papers to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in May, is dropping 75 staffers.

According to a memo obtained by Jim Romenesko, the cuts were coming from “corporate staff departments and in the digital media section of the Growth and Performance group.”

“Affected employees are being notified effective today; however, certain positions will have a deferred termination date between now and the end of the year for various business reasons,” wrote Media General’s CEO, Marshall Morton, in the memo.

For more, head over to Romensko’s site.

Sam Grobart is leaving The New York Times for Bloomberg Businessweek. According to a memo obtained by Jim Romenesko, Grobart will “develop multimedia projects” as well as write tech features for Businessweek. Grobart had been with the Times since 2008, most recently as personal technology editor, since 2010.

“His [Grobart] innate sense of good service journalism helped us create the Gadgetwise blog, which focused on how to get the most out of personal technology. He was also instrumental in developing the look and tone of the Bits blog,” read the Times memo.

Grobart’s last day at the Times is August 3.

Jonah Lehrer, formerly of Wired and recently hired by The New Yorker, is in serious trouble. Jim Romenesko pointed out that Lehrer lifted parts of a New Yorker piece from one he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, and the situation has snowballed since then. New York’s Daily Intel noted several other instances of Lehrer plagiarizing himself and now Edward Champion explains that Lehrer recycled material for his book, Imagine. Poynter also found that he lifted quotes from a story written by someone else:

An editor’s note at the foot of his excellent New Yorker piece on brainstorming says some Noam Chomsky quotes within it ‘were not made directly to Jonah Lehrer’ and that ‘Chomsky and his colleague were interviewed by Peter Dizikes for his article in the November/December issue of Technology Review.’ Gulp.

Gulp indeed. As of now, the only comment from the New Yorker is from its web editor, Nicholas Thompson, who called the plagiarizing “a mistake.” A slew of Lehrer’s posts on his “Frontal Cortex” blog also have editors notes tacked onto them. But how long until Lehrer gets the axe? He can’t possibly keep his job after all this, can he?

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Jim Romenesko is reporting that Sarah Cohen, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, is joining The New York Times. Cohen comes to the Times from Duke University, where she served as Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy since 2009.

Prior to her time at Duke, Cohen was a veteran of The Washington Post, where she won the Pulizter for Investigative Reporting.

According to a Times memo, the addition of Cohen will be well received:

Sarah comes highly recommended by … about half the newsroom, with rave reviews from everyone in our CAR cluster, and from Aron Pilhofer, Jo Becker and former colleagues at other organizations. Several people threatened to kill us unless we hired her.

Cohen begins August 1.

Warren Buffett is going to buy more newspapers. Yes, in addition to the 63 his Berkshire Hathaway Media Group scooped up last week. In a letter sent to the editors and publishers of those publications, Buffett says he “will probably purchase more papers in the next few years.” While that’s not a concrete statement, Buffett is a big newspaper fan, so it’s going to happen.

Not only is Buffett going to buy more papers, in the memo — which was obtained by Jim Romenesko via The Omaha-World Herald — he even outlines where they’ll likely be found:

We will favor towns and cities with a strong sense of community, comparable to the 26 in which we will soon operate. If a citizenry cares little about its community, it will eventually care little about its newspaper. In a very general way, strong interest in community affairs varies inversely with population size and directly with the number of years a community’s population has been in residence. Therefore, we will focus on small and mid-sized papers in long-established communities.

If your town qualifies, get ready. Buffett, the Savior of Small Newspapers, is coming to save your beloved publication.

Unless he dies first. But even then, we bet he puts your little paper in his will. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and FishbowlNY loves him for it.

This afternoon Nick Denton sent Gawker Media staffers a memo outlining some managerial and advertising changes. Nothing major was announced, but here are some highlights via Jim Romenesko, who obtained the memo.

• “We are creating a new content department within sales to be headed by Ray [Wert]. It will encompass the existing creative services team and several additional functions: primarily branded content, marketing communications and events. Ray is the first editor to move to sales.”
• “The days of the banner advertisement are numbered. In two years, our primary offering to marketers will be our discussion platform. Expanding on our existing sponsored post program, Ray’s team will recruit and identify a client’s spokespeople and advocates, advise them on web etiquette and language, and help make their most persuasive case.”
• “The second main growth area for Gawker Media is content-driven commerce, ranging from affiliate marketing to in-page transactions. A historical tidbit: the original business model for Gizmodo was affiliate fees from purchases of gadgets through Amazon. We didn’t have the scale then to make that work. We do now.”

For the full memo, click through to Romenesko’s site.

Jim Romenesko is reporting that The New York Times Company has laid off a slew of people on the corporate side, including longtime lawyer George Freeman.

“Yes, there were non-newsroom layoffs announced Wednesday in corporate and business-side positions and this was to adjust to the changing business environment and maintain our financial health,” Corporate Communications Senior Vice President Robert Christie, told Romenesko.

Freeman had been with the Times company for just over 30 years, most recently working as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel. He told Romenesko that he was “saddened and shocked” to learn that he had been among the cuts.

After this morning’s brutal report from the British panel, you had to figure Rupert Murdoch would eventually address it with staffers. Jim Romenesko obtained a memo from Murdoch to Dow Jones employees, and here is a snippet:

I recognize that for all of us – myself in particular – it is difficult to read many of the report’s findings. But we have done the most difficult part, which has been to take a long, hard and honest look at our past mistakes.

There is no easy way around this, but I am proud to say that we have been working hard to put things right.

We certainly should have acted more quickly and aggressively to uncover wrongdoing. We deeply regret what took place and have taken our share of responsibility for not rectifying the situation sooner.

For the full memo, click through.

File this under “Reading Can Be Helpful.” According to Jim Romenesko, Luke Kummer, a reporter for The Daily, resigned after seeing that one of his stories was edited in a way he didn’t appreciate. Kummer submitted his resignation, and then tweeted to The Daily’s account that the new story, “has nothing to do with my reporting. I object to it in every way. I wrote straight w/o absurd sensationalism.”

Unfortunately for Kummer, the tweet was a breach of contract according to a letter he received from The Daily:

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The Associated Press has named Anne Gearan as its new National Security writer, assigned to the White House. In a memo obtained by Jim Romenesko, the AP’s Washington Bureau Chief, Sally Buzbee says that Gearan will report to Terry Hunt, Deputy Washington Bureau Chief.

“As Chief White House Correspondent Ben Feller and his team focus on the campaign and economy this year, it’s critical we keep a strong focus on issues like Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” wrote Buzbee.