>As all of this was happening, the economic prospects for newspapers were becoming grimmer. In response, beginning in 2008, the Times began the first in a serie

>As all of this was happening, the economic prospects for newspapers were becoming grimmer. In response, beginning in 2008, the Times began the first in a series of six buyouts of its most experienced staff, reducing costs by replacing them with new hires. Within a few years, a half century of institutional memory had been erased and newsroom culture transformed – hardly the way to insure a great institution’s continuity. ... > ... >Digital transformation had been the subject of earlier reports at the Times and all over the media world. But there was a startling tone to this one. It gave minimal attention, if any, to the Times’ most important asset: the editorial and critical judgment that would be necessary as a counterweight to the need to drive traffic. > ... >There is also a hectoring tone in the report, which can even seem to anticipate the tone of "cancel culture," praising news organizations that have used "buyouts" for "clearing out reporters and editors who were actively opposing changes" – a sweeping approach that extended into 2017 at the Times and opened the paper to heightened forms of political advocacy. To be quite honest, if you read between the lines, it sounds a lot like the New York Times basically turned large parts of itself into Buzzfeed or Gawker in order to adapt to a revenue model that fit today's social-media landscape, in the process basically trashing their own institutional knowledge of how to do journalism and (this being the goal, from the owners' point of view) deskilling their journalistic workforce.