More hard times ahead at the Washington Post, which you may recall is the money-losing newspaper division of the Kaplan test prep and for-profit education empire. This morning, editors sent staff a memo offering a voluntary buyout, at least the fifth since 2004. All the staff reductions have apparently taught the Posties a lesson in efficiency; editor Marcus Brauchli reports that the latest cuts "won’t affect the quality, ambition or authority of our journalism. We believe this is possible, given the changes in how we work and the great successes we have had building our digital readership lately." As denizens of a smaller newsroom than in the past ourselves at Washington City Paper, we're curious to see how that works out for the Post.

UPDATE: Postie and former City Paper and TBD.com editor Erik Wemple has more details from the meeting the paper held to discuss the buyout offer. "We did feel there were coverage areas where we could afford to absorb reductions," Brauchli told staffers. "In general we want to maintain a strong newsroom across all of our core areas." What are those core areas? According to Jim Romenesko, "National politics, National enterprise, National security, Foreign, the Sports columnists, Capital Business, the Style critics, digital designers, graphic designers, Outlook and Weekend." What that list doesn't include? "Business, Metro, the Magazine, Style, news designers and copy editors on the Universal desk." Only staffers in the latter group of departments are eligible for the buyouts. Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton says the paper is looking to eliminate 48 jobs out of about 200 eligible positions.

Which means the Post doesn't consider local news coverage a "core area" for the paper anymore.

Read the full memo announcing the buyouts below:

To the staff:

Today, we are announcing that we will offer a voluntary buyout to some Newsroom employees. Our objective is a limited staff reduction that won’t affect the quality, ambition or authority of our journalism. We believe this is possible, given the changes in how we work and the great successes we have had building our digital readership lately.

To preserve that momentum, we do not intend to offer this program to every department or individual in the Newsroom. The reality is that we’re able to absorb staffing changes better in some areas than in others. In those departments where we do offer the buyout, there will be caps on the number of people who can participate, in order to moderate the impact and preserve our competitiveness in core coverage areas. In addition, we may turn down some volunteers if we feel their departure would impair our journalism. That said, it is important that we achieve real savings.

The exact details of the buyout, technically a voluntary Separation Incentive Program, will come later, after the company talks to the Guild about its proposed terms. Here’s what we can tell you now: The program does not accelerate pension benefits. It will include enhanced separation payments and company-paid COBRA (health insurance) premiums for eligible fulltime employees. Post representatives will be discussing the proposed program with the Guild over the next two weeks, consistent with the terms of the labor contract. The terms they agree on also will be included in an offer to Newsroom editors in eligible departments.

This program will be available for a specified period of time only; employees will have 45 days to study this offer and decide whether to accept it or decline it. The Post will schedule the final date of employment for those who elect to resign as part of this program; for most employees this will mean a resignation date of May 31, 2012.

Any measure like this is difficult. But we believe this approach is a sensible and effective way of addressing the economic forces affecting our industry. We constantly rethink how we do certain things in order to become more efficient, agile and competitive; this will require more such thinking. The Post’s Newsroom remains formidable, and we will continue making tactical hires so that even as we get smaller, we get stronger.

We plan to distribute SIP packages to eligible employees in a few weeks. We will have two Town Hall meetings today, at 11 a.m. in the Community Room and at 4:30 p.m. in the Auditorium, to answer your questions.

Marcus Liz Shirley Peter

In my item (linked above, please read it!), I quote from two OAG lawyers' e-mails to the fire department. The two attorneys call out the department for their potentially damaging stonewalling on the discovery, and question whether fire investigators followed basic national standards when they worked the Georgetown library case.

In my calls to the OAG prior to publishing the piece (linked above, please read it!), I got nowhere. Nothing much beyond no comment, it's pending litigation, the usual.

A few hours after my item ran (linked above, please read it!), OAG's Kimberly Matthews called to say she really, really wanted to see those e-mails. Could I please send them to her?

I wondered aloud to Matthews: Why would you need me to give you e-mails your own people sent? Couldn't you get the e-mails another way like by asking the attorneys that sent them? After all, the e-mails were sent by her people.

I told her no dice.

I wonder if this is a ploy to try and figure out who leaked me those e-mails? Or am I just being paranoid?

Will you, dear reader, beg to pay us for our online journalism?

*photo courtesy of mediabistro.

It reads in part:

"While this reorganization has many positive elements, there is also an unfortunate consequence of this assessment, and that is the elimination of 44 editorial positions, spread across all newsrooms. These decisions, along with our earlier commercial changes, have been extremely difficult to make, and are now made only after a nearly two-month painstaking effort to review our editorial teams and determine our needs going forward. But we are happy to now say that our restructure is complete, and no further personnel reductions of this nature are forthcoming."

We know what these things are like. Our hearts go out to those staffers cut. Politico has a small item on the cuts.

As I selected my senior yearbook photo via the world wide interwebs this week, I took a minute to think about the difference between the presentation of those images today versus previous generations.

Today, photography companies are offering many ways to make yourself look better. There are options for retouching and removing scars, tan lines, moles, tattoos, piercings, and stray hairs (just $40 a pose!). Being a poor college student, I'll take my photo with the flaws, thank you very much.

But it got me thinking about the generations of students before me who probably would have paid that money because those yearbook photos were the defining photo of their collegiate career. The artificially posed snapshot in time was the photo that their college friends would remember them by for all eternity.

Those photos sometimes gave us a peek into what a person was actually like at the time the photo was taken.

Take John Slattery. Sure, now he's the silver-haired, womanizing, suave Roger Sterling of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency.

But before he was a Mad Man, Slattery was a young adult.

Yes, 1984 John Slattery was a beast of a different name. This John popped the collar of his denim jacket two decades before that three-week period in 2005 when it was cool again.  John didn't conform to society's rules on shaving and, based strictly off his expression in this photo from the 1984 Catholic University yearbook, he also got high on a regular basis.

Or what about Ed Liddy, the CEO of AIG? There he is, blinded by the sunlight in 1968. No boring pose here, just a quick snapshot by some student photographer who tracked him down outside the library 41 years ago.

In the 1960s, yearbook portraits were often taken in a unique environment, not in front of a backdrop. The subject of the photograph could wear whatever he or she wanted.

Today, there's a dress code—a suit and tie or blouse covered by a cap and gown for a portrait six months to a year before you actually get your diploma.

That's because big companies like Jostens and Herff Jones are taking the previously student-run production of a yearbook out of the hands of the students and are turning it into a big business. They're churning out portraits of seniors like an assembly line using online scheduling tools and order forms.

Small yearbook staffs, already overworked and busy with school on top of the massive responsibility of a yearbook project (and getting little benefit from the large commitment of time and effort), are happy to have the work taken out of their hands. Some companies are better than others and have given students the tools and support they need to complete the yearbooks, but money remains their main motivation.

Some yearbooks, sadly, are folding, including one at a college in Minnesota. Other yearbook staffers, are getting lazy and copying and pasting photos from social network sites.

The vast majority of undergraduates don't buy a yearbook until their senior year, and the same seems true at high schools like this one in Arizona.

It's tough for yearbooks to get students to send in their photos, and tougher to support a staff photographer to photograph events, especially as advertising dollars dwindle. Often yearbooks end up filled with photos of the same groups of friends who were proactive in sending in their photos. The rest get the generic headshot.

But this "Facebook can replace the yearbook" notion is bullshit. Yearbooks aren't meant to be a printed version of self-taken photos of you and your friends, they're meant to chronicle major events that were important to the whole community. It's a rundown of the whole year with a solid visual presentation that will be a keepsake and serve as a historical record for the institution from a student perspective.

Now if only we could find students with the time and motivation to do the work themselves.

I believe in the profession of journalism.

I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust.

I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism.

I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true.

I believe that suppression of the news, for any consideration other than the welfare of society, is indefensible.

I believe that no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman; that bribery by one’s own pocketbook is as much to be avoided as bribery by the pocketbook of another; that individual responsibility may not be escaped by pleading another’s instructions or another’s dividends.

I believe that advertising, news and editorial columns should alike serve the best interests of readers; that a single standard of helpful truth and cleanness should prevail for all; that the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service.

I believe that the journalism which succeeds best—and best deserves success—fears God and honors Man; is stoutly independent, unmoved by pride of opinion or greed of power, constructive, tolerant but never careless, self-controlled, patient, always respectful of its readers but always unafraid, is quickly indignant at injustice; is unswayed by the appeal of privilege or the clamor of the mob; seeks to give every man a chance and, as far as law and honest wage and recognition of human brotherhood can make it so, an equal chance; is profoundly patriotic while sincerely promoting international good will and cementing world-comradeship; is a journalism of humanity, of and for today’s world.

And here is what I propose to follow the em dash in the last graf: JESUS CHRIST WE ARE SO FREAKING SCREWED OH GOD WHY DIDN'T I GO TO LAW SCHOOL LIKE MY BROTHER?

Then there should probably be something that represents the sobs that follow your daily look at JournalismJobs.com and wondering whether going for the night editor gig at the Killeen Daily Herald would be such a bad move given the state of things. Now that would be fearing God!

Then the words DARKNESS! OH MY LORD THE DARKNESS! And...scene.

That all went down on Dec. 21.

Since then, Parker has left his job at the Detroit News. In officialese, he resigned, but his editor, Don Nauss, talked about how to interpret that bit of news: "We said we were taking the matter seriously and we would deal with it. Draw your own conclusions about what transpired. I have to emphasize Rob submitted his resignation and we accepted it. It was a voluntary action.''

How 'bout this for a voluntary action, Nauss: Why don't you get a new job?

Think about it for a second. A columnist–which means, in news terms, a person who's entitled, and indeed encouraged, to push opinions into the public realm–asked a person in authority an edgy question. And a great question. The facts show that the coach hired his son-in-law to be defensive coordinator, and said defensive coordinator ends up stinking up the arena for two seasons straight.

Now, wasn't it time for a question about nepotism from your hard-hitting columnist, Mr. Nauss? Isn't that exactlythe sort of inquiry you want coming out of his mouth? But you, Mr. Nauss, insist that the question was unprofessional, perhaps prompted by Marinelli himself, who took objection to the question, saying, ''Anytime you attack my daughter, I've got a problem with that.'' (Just to set the record straight, coach: No, the columnist wasn't attacking your daughter; he was attacking your hiring acumen. No wonder you've been fired.)

I suppose none of this would have happened if Parker had been more bland with his phrasing: "Sir, you hired a defensive coordinator who's also part of your family. Do you regret that decision, and did that fact that he was part of your family influence your decision to make the hire?"

But the difference between that question and the one that Parker asked is a dash of attitude, of panache–just the stuff, in other words, that we seek from our columnists. Just tick off the negatives here: Parker wasn't being: 1) biased; 2) racist; 3) inaccurate; 4) insensitive; and 5) he wasn't twisting quotes, making up facts, or otherwise misrepresenting himself or failing to disclose a conflict of interest, or any of those other journalistic misdeeds.

This was just plain good journalism.

This project will build a working “SimCity” model of Washington, DC, visualizing the federal buildings and placing avatars of elected and appointed officials in and around them. Based in open source tools such as Blender and the Python language, the environment will be built from the ground up with hooks to work with other open source data-driven projects as well as social networking sites. (The interface and engine can be brokered to model any state's capitol, or any city in any state or nation.) Beyond the platform interface, the goal is to attach vast databases of public information: The effects of federal policies/politics on local policies/politics; the structure of financial relationships and their effects on policies/politics. Strong journalism – print, broadcast and new media – that relates these communities to Washington will be easy to find and new audiences will appreciate the relevance to their communities.

This may be an improvement over hiring a smart reporter in a D.C. bureau. I can't see how, though.