Whitaker on Matthews: Expect Layoffs at the NYT

Are there more cuts coming at the NYT? NBC’s Mark Whitaker seemed to think so on this weekend’s Chris Matthews Show. Says Whitaker:

Look, it’s a — it’s a real problem. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer couldn’t survive with a newsroom of 165 people. It’s going down to a Web staff of 20. The New York Times still has over 1,000, The Washington Post has almost 800. Those are going to have to go down. So if investigative journalism is going to survive, it’s because institutions, those newspapers, their owners decide that if they only have a limited number of people left, they’re still going to keep those people on investigative reporting.

As Michael Calderone points out despite the Times well-documented financial troubles, the paper has yet to suffer severe layoffs. And at this stage it’s not hard to imagine the Times opting for some sort of paid content before allowing such widespread cuts to take place.

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