In mid-March the Mirror’s board had its quarterly meeting. The next day a memo from the publisher was posted in New York and circulated to all the bureaus. In Washington a crowd gathered to read it as soon as Marcus put it on the board.

Mirror Corp. today is announcing an important initiative to improve the newspaper’s economic performance and thereby enhance its future value for readers, employees and shareholders. Because of rising newsprint costs and declining advertising revenues, we must cut expenses now. Other departments—advertising, marketing, circulation and production—have already made substantial personnel cuts over the past two years. Now, it is the turn of the newsroom.

Over the next 12 months, we will reduce newsroom staffing by roughly 60 slots, or about 10 percent. To minimize the impact of these cuts on the quality of the paper, I am asking department heads and bureau chiefs to study their operations and submit plans as soon as possible for carrying out these reductions. To the extent possible, we will meet these reductions through attrition, but this will not be possible in all cases, and some newsroom employees will lose their jobs. Career counseling will be available for all affected employees.

We are also entering today into a joint venture with Press Alert, a privately held international communications company, to produce a new financial news service that will use some of our existing resources. We hope to target this new product at the fast-growing market for electronic news and data retrieval. The new service will be called “Mirror Alert.” We will also receive a substantial equity investment from our joint venture partner.

The steps we are announcing today will be difficult for many of us. But they are essential to protect the newspaper we love.

—Philip Sellinger, Publisher

Two days later the bureau chief summoned my friend George Dirk and told him, nicely, that he was being fired. Washington had been asked to cut five slots as part of the cost-reduction plan, and Dirk’s was one. Because Dirk had done so many good things for the paper over the years, the bureau chief had found a spot for him—with only a small pay cut—in the Washington bureau of Mirror Alert, the new financial news service. The bureau would be based in northern Virginia, out of the reach of the Newspaper Guild, so it wouldn’t offer the same benefits as a reporting job at the Mirror, but Dirk could have it if he wanted it.