The new normal. (Photo via zieak)

The New York Times is on it. Seriously. When not floating out trend stories about this hip new neighborhood called Williamsburg--or their bi-annual fashion declaration, "Skirts are back!"--they manage to dig up the most archaic study about the craziest thing you've ever heard of, and then announce it like it's something you should not only be aware of, but have been discussing for the last six months.

Like obviously, this: "Sucking Your Child’s Pacifier Clean May Have Benefits." What a perfect headline, because it's vague enough that it assumes you already know whose health this habit is benefiting, and precise enough to guilt you into thinking, "Oh my god, I must have the only doolah on the block who doesn't know that putting my saliva all over my infant's pacifier, in lieu of actually washing it, will keep him allergy and eczema free for life!"

Except, you know, the results are pretty inconclusive. It turns out that while telling your kid to eat some dirt once in awhile might kickstart an immune system  that, say, John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble could only dream of, it can also lead to tooth decay (for the baby--not for you, adult suckling on a plastic nipple substitute). Apparently, this trend is so rampant that the New York Health Department has been forced to put up subway ads to dissuade mouth-sharing activities with your newborn.

I mean, but come on...they are only baby teeth. Though in the end, this story is all sound and fury, signifying nothing:

The study, carried out in Sweden, could not prove that the pacifiers laden with parents’ saliva were the direct cause of the reduced allergies.

Glad we got that matter settled!

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. (Photo via NYC.gov).

"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap," Dolly Parton famously said. Well, nowhere is that more true than in Hipster Brooklyn, a magical land that The New York Times seemingly "discovers" once every five weeks. In today's Style section, the Times sent intrepid middle-aged Manhattanite reporter Henry Alford to Williamsburg to live like the locals do (which, coincidentally, is also the way one would live if one were living one's life according to trend stories in the Times Style section).

So how much did Mr. Alford's long weekend of living the artisanal life actually cost the newspaper, which confirmed that it covered Mr. Alford's expenses but, citing policy, declined to share costs?

According to our back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, it looks like the Times spent at least $1,600 to send Mr. Alford to Williamsburg--and that is not even counting paying the author for the story or the photographer for the accompanying slide show, or the likelihood that Mr. Alford got a Blue Bottle coffee or a rosemary-infused cocktail at the Wythe Hotel's rooftop bar.

Let's break it down:

• Three nights at the Wythe Hotel: $1,065 to $1,257 + tax (according to the desk clerk at the hotel. It depends on whether has a view of Brooklyn or Manhattan)
• Knife skills class at Third Ward: $69 (according to Mr. Alford's article)
• Short-sleeve paid shirt from H. W. Carter and Sons: $225 (according to Mr. Alford's article)
• Assorted vintage items to complete the look: $26 (according to Mr. Alford's article)
• Bike rental from Zukies bike shop: $25 per day + $10 for a helmet and lock. Assuming Mr. Alford rented the bike and accessories for three days, that brings the total to $105.
• Straight-razor shave at Barber & Supply: $40
• Dinner at Roberta's: Although Mr. Alford didn't specify what he ate, we can (modestly) assume he spent around $50
• Chocolate bar at Mast Brothers: $9

Well, nobody ever said that becoming the object of trend-piece ridicule was cheap. And the article formerly known as "Will.i.ams.burg" (the print headline was changed online to "How I Became a Hipster" sometime this morning) certainly accomplished that. All in the name of journalism, etc.

The New York Times wants you to look at the hipsters. (Joe Mande)

Ach, we really thought The New York Times was finally starting to get the picture with its April 28th piece, "Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease." In it, Noam Cohen finally acknowledged the Twitter feed @NYTOnIt as being "prompted when a trend article from The New York Times seems too obvious or too generic." Examples given in the article included "the arrival of fall, the use of staplers, and how night stands are becoming more crowded."

Point duly noted, the Times seemed to be saying in this piece, showing that it was not above poking fun of its history of non-trend trend stories. But it turns out that the Grey Lady was merely blowing her media audience a raspberry, as Thursday's Style section cover story is about...one man's observations about Williamsburg. No, no catch, no angle: Just one guy, checking out the 'burg to see what the big deal is and trying to blend in with the natives at Roberta's. (Which still counts as Williamsburg, you know, metaphysically.) And yes, it's supposed to be funny, which is probably the saddest part about this sad attempt that begins with--wait for it--the title:

Will.i.amsburg

Oh yes, there are slideshows on how to become--like embedded journo and famed investigative humorist Henry Alford did--a Williamsburg hipster. Tips like: go be condescending to employees at H.W. Carter & Sons by telling them, "I’m going for a Mumford & Sons look. I want to look like I play the banjo." And: Hang around the top of the Wythe Hotel (where all Williamsburg residents congregate to listen to Skrillex, remember? From last time?) and wait till somebody describes themselves as an "affinity consultant" so you can mock them in your led. Except it's never really explained what an affinity consultant does, though it turns out that the guy was from Manhattan and only staying at the Wythe in order to a similar anthropological study on the "cool kids" of Bedford Avenue.

"O, Bohemia!" indeed, Mr. Alford. No, we get this piece was written cheekily and wasn't meant to be taken all that seriously as the author turned his your nose at a non-locally sourced pair of socks "like an organic farmer who has learned that a friend has named her child Monsanto." (Which...huh? Would the analogy here be that you'd turn your nose up at a child for having a silly name?)

Or his pratfall excursions on a "fixie" fixed gear bike. Clearly, this was supposed to be The New York Times' attempt at recreating Brian Williams' epic artisinal cheeses rant.

The problem being that this is all old hat by now: Making fun of bearded hipsters on Bedford is a decade-old joke by this point, and it shows that The New York Times' must be scraping pretty low in its barrel-bottom in order to be mocking the trends and businesses that it once breathlessly agitated for. (That's Slate's job.)

Is "Will.i.amsburg" trying to say Williamsburg is over? Or that it's inherent value system of cynic aestheticism as exemplified by a Bushwick pizzeria are ridiculous? And if so, did we need this not-so-scathing satire to tell us?

After all, by nature of it being a New York Times Style story, the rest of the world was notified about this "trend" approximately 18-24 months ago.

Brian Stelter. (Photo via Facebook.)

Last week was quite a whirlwind for New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter. Top of The Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, his look at the world of morning television, hit shelves, and Mr. Stelter found himself in the potentially awkward situation of appearing as a guest on morning shows to talk about a book about morning shows.

At press time, Mr. Stelter had done around 20 media appearances, with more scheduled. He was on Morning Edition, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN’s Early Start, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. Revelations were sprinkled throughout the tabloids and on the cover of Us Weekly, which featured a smiling photo of Ann Curry in a yellow cardigan, arms defiantly resting on her hips, with the headline “Stabbed in the Back: They called her ‘Big Bird’ and plotted to get rid of her. How Ann Curry’s coworkers tortured her and why she won’t forgive Matt Lauer.” 

“I feel the same way a morning producer feels at 9 a.m.—proud of my work, happy that people have seen it for themselves and dog-tired,” Mr. Stelter told Off the Record over the weekend.

Although The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story the weekend before the book came out on some of the juicier elements about Ms. Curry’s ouster and the drama with Matt Lauer behind the scenes, the newspaper itself panned the book in a review

“Brian Stelter’s book on the nefarious network morning show wars ends up being like a breakfast made not quite to order,” veteran television critic Ed Bark wrote. “The eggs over easy have one hard yolk, and the bacon’s a little limp. The toast is well-buttered but burned, and the coffee’s short on heat. Edible? Yes. Fulfilling? Not quite.”

Mr. Bark then took the reporter to task for his use of metaphor, which, when comparing a book to breakfast in the opening of a review, seemed a tad unfair.

“It’s a breezy read with more than a little overblown prose, some of it just plain silly,” Mr. Bark continued, noting that the author, at 27, still has “ample time really to get the hang of this.”

“I expected a tough review,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. “If it had been glowing, readers would have rolled their eyes.”

Tough review or not, it did little to quell the celebration. Mr. Stelter’s girlfriend, NY1 traffic reporter Jamie Shupak, organized a book party at The Park in Chelsea. (The book is dedicated to Mr. Stelter’s parents and to Ms. Shupak: “For Jamie, my love, who makes every morning a good one.” Of course, Ms. Shupak is usually at the NY1 studios before dawn to report on traffic conditions.)

Sunlight streamed through the large windows, making it difficult to see the media people, drinks in hand, who stood with their backs to the view of the High Line.

“You know, Jamie was the social director of her sorority,” Mr. Stelter told OTR. We didn’t doubt it. The bubbly brunette, in a lime green minidress, acted every bit the hostess, posing for pictures and thanking people for coming. In keeping with the theme, the dessert table featured chocolate cakes shaped like miniature TV sets and peanut butter balls shaped like tiny suns.

“Matt Lauer and Ann Curry send their regrets,” joked Mr. Stelter, before thanking both his and Ms. Shupak’s moms and a host of editors and colleagues, many of whom were in the room.

“The hardest part was putting together a guest list,” Ms. Shupak said, explaining that she had to keep adding people at the last minute. But Ms. Shupak evidently did a good job. In addition to her family and his, there was a strong Times contingent: Michael Grynbaum, Michael Barbaro, Christine Haughney, Dave Itzkoff, Julie Bloom, Stephanie Clifford, Julie Bosman and Bill Carter all seemed relaxed despite a Politico hit piece on executive editor Jill Abramson’s tenure that ran earlier in the week. Bloggers, television execs and NY1 hosts rounded out the list.

Out on the balcony, media reporter David Carr smoked a cigarette in the setting sun while talking to a friend of Ms. Shupak’s mom.

As we were leaving, NY1’s Pat Kiernan reminded us to grab a copy of the book. They were almost gone.

Babies without diapers. (Getty Images)

The New York Times has a very good, very important story today about parents who don't diaper their children and let them urinate/defecate wherever they want because of the environment, but also because it allows one to be in touch their child's "elimination communications." We're trying to refrain from judgement, but shouldn't parents be doing the communicating about where its appropriate to go pee-pee, since they know language and don't have a soft spot on their skull?

This item was full of gems, most notably the ending:

Still, even the most ardent practitioners observe some limits. “I don’t think you can walk down Fifth Avenue and just let your baby poop on the sidewalk," [some lady] said.

This essay has caused a veritable--excuse our punnery--shitstorm on the web that the Times' commenting section alone is worth the read. Here are just a choice few of our favorites.


Linda raises a very good point: most college students don't know how to use a toilet despite early training.

There's nothing like White Knighting the parent whose toddler is defecating outside Saks.

We love you, Alan.

No one was asking you over for supper, lady. But you're right...gross.

Ha, you should meet our friend, Alan. You guys would get along.

Truer words, etc.,

Nobody is going to fire him anymore.

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

At 37, Mr. Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. His Atlantic essays, guest columns for The New York Times and blog posts are defined by a distinct blend of eloquence, authenticity and nuance. And he has been picking up fans in very high places.

Fans like Rachel Maddow, who tweeted: “Don’t know, if in US commentary, there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg described him as “one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America,” when announcing that Mr. Coates had won the 2012 prize for commentary from The Sidney Hillman Foundation. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who recently hosted a book reading at MIT with Mr. Coates, a visiting professor at the school, said that “he is as fine a nonfiction writer as anyone working today.”

Without a Ph.D., Mr. Coates is an uncommon visiting professor at MIT. In fact, he doesn’t even have a college degree, having dropped out of Howard University, failing both British and American literature. Before that, he failed 11th-grade English.

“If you had told me he would be a big deal, I would have said, ‘Get real,’” said Times media critic David Carr. Mr. Coates’s first writing gig was at the Washington City Paper, where Mr. Carr was his editor. “He needed work. He was not a great speller. He wasn’t terrific with names. And he wasn’t all that ambitious.”

Indeed, it was an inauspicious beginning.

The article that launched Mr. Coates toward stardom, his first for The Atlantic, came on the heels of his departure from Time. In that piece, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” Mr. Coates situated Bill Cosby’s attention-getting criticisms of black men within the tradition of African-American self-help conservatism championed by Booker T. Washington.

Published in 2008, the article was well-received and eventually included in the collection Best African American Essays 2010. And yet, it almost was never printed. Mr. Coates had started working on the piece the previous year, when he was at Time, and it was rejected by several publications before Mr. Coates asked Mr. Carr if he knew of a home for it. The Atlantic editor James Bennet was receptive.

“I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic soon after the article came out, “but it shows the power of that networking. I couldn’t help notice that it was one well-placed white dude talking to another well-placed white dude to get it published.”

Ideas about race and racial identity have always been with Mr. Coates. He was introduced to the writing world by his father, a former Black Panther and Vietnam vet who ran an Afrocentric publishing house out of the family’s home in West Baltimore. “I was surrounded by books and ideas. We literally had the machinery for creating books in our basement,” said Mr. Coates, who is tall but carries himself casually. (In his Atlantic author photo, he sports thick black-framed glasses and a driving cap, which is what he wore on the day we met as well.)

The printing press existed alongside the geek paraphernalia that Mr. Coates constantly mentions in his writing—video games, comic books and Dungeons & Dragons are among his obsessions. Mr. Coates’s writings are also filled with anecdotes and lessons extracted from his time spent in an urban reality most American journalists know only from watching season four of The Wire (which was actually filmed at Mr. Coates’s old school, William H. Lemmel Middle). In this way, he finds relevant insights into debates that are mere abstraction for so many other pundits.

Of course, growing up in difficult circumstances doesn’t inherently confer wisdom. In another writer’s hands, the constant invocation of childhood adversity would seem like a ham-handed attempt to assert credibility. But Mr. Coates’s talent is a lottery-ticket-rare ability to both reveal his personal life and seem extraordinarily humble. He also has a disarming habit of smiling as he speaks.

Once, when confronted by the conservative Daily News columnist John McWhorter about something mean-spirited Mr. Coates had written about him, Mr. Coates immediately apologized, saying, “It was tremendously unkind.”

Mr. McWhorter was taken aback by the honesty. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he admitted.

And while it must be said that Mr. Coates’s memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, fails in pulling off the delicate balance between remembrance and braggadocio, the book does advance a theme that has underscored much of his work—that the dismissal of hip-hop as merely “a symbol of the decline of the West if ever there was one,” as the National Review recently argued, is only a subtler form of the same lazy ignorance that runs through centuries of racist stereotypes of young black men.

“I learned about writing from hip-hop,” he said. “More than any books I’ve ever read, hip-hop’s use of language and sense of geography influenced me—there is something about the condensed space that music forces you into.”

Nelson Fernandez, Jim Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But he is no music critic. Mr. Coates’s writing about hip-hop is normally a segue into his main subject: race. In a February Times column, he suggested the White House study the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s new album as a way to understand the effects of gun violence, among the most unlikely public policy proposals of recent years. But Mr. Coates bristles at suggestions that race is his beat. “I think I write about America, and about things that interest me,” he told The Observer.

When The Village Voice asked Mr. Coates to write a column about black men, he objected. “The moment you put that upon yourself—‘black correspondent’—that’s always with you, you never get rid of that,” he said.

Still, racial issues are what Mr. Coates writes about most, and what he is best known for. Everything Mr. Coates has written for The Atlantic’s print magazine, for which he serves as senior editor, has regarded race in one form or another.

Perhaps his best-known piece is a 10,000-word article called “Fear of a Black President,” about Barack Obama’s inability to mention race without alienating white voters. It snakes through the importance of Mr. Obama’s presidency for African-Americans while showing the limitations of that achievement. The article “had the kind of impact for which magazines hunger,” wrote a blogger at Harvard’s Neiman Foundation.

For Mr. Coates, the job of the writer, even the pundit, is not to persuade. “The job of the writer should be one of humility, I think, one of being ignorant and learning—not to stand up and pretend to know everything,” he said. “I’m not a consultant or a race expert.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates is particularly anxious about being seen as some kind of black spokesman. And even Stephen Colbert poked fun at this idea when, in January, Mr. Coates appeared on The Colbert Report and the host asked him: “Are you guys still all excited about this first black president thing, or have you gotten over that?”

Mr. Coates says he is uninspired by the emails he receives telling him how his writing has helped someone win an argument. “That ain’t my burden. I don’t write to help others with their racism, and I’m not here to educate you,” he said. “I’m here to be insanely curious.”

It’s not hard to see how Mr. Coates’s sphere of influence has grown along with his outsized online community. Some even say he has redefined the blogging form. “There’s really nobody else who does what he does, in terms of creating a community of people around his blog,” said Mr. Carr. “He does a ton of moderating that blog and putting in time with it, and it’s become a self-policing community, which is really remarkable. He goes where he wants to go, and the community goes along with him.”

According to Natalie Raabe, communications director for The Atlantic, it has “by far the most engaged community in our comments section.”

If Mr. Coates is notable for popping into his own comments section to praise or criticize posters, it’s because he has a distinct vision of blogging. “It is its own space; it’s not the entire web—there are plenty of places to go if you want to do other things,” he said. He gestures to the establishment we’re in. “This is an individual place—if you started yelling in here or screaming that they need to be serving chicken if they don’t want to, they’d kick you out. They have the right to be their own spot.”

And yet the blog might end soon. “Managing a community is tough,” Mr. Coates admitted, adding that he’d like to be able to just be a fan of things without feeling the need to constantly comment. “I’m leery of talking too much—I feel like I need to sit with an idea for a year or two if I want. Isn’t that what a writer’s supposed to do?”

Mr. Coates is currently finishing a novel on the Underground Railroad and will soon be submitting to a publisher a book of essays about the Civil War, a subject he has been infatuated with on his blog for five years.

And blog or no blog, Mr. Coates is likely staying at The Atlantic. The Times asked him to become a regular columnist, but Mr. Coates rejected the most coveted real estate in American journalism. He would not comment on the matter, but recently wrote on his blog about the difficulties of writing a twice-a-week Times op-ed column. He suggested that he would be taxed writing so frequently at such length, and feared his writing would suffer.

“I won’t go so far as to say I’d fail,” he wrote. “But I strongly suspect that the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would—inside of a year—be tweeting, ‘Remember when that dude could actually write?’” Of course, that humility is exactly what makes readers want to see Mr. Coates on the op-ed page twice a week. The fact is, wherever he writes next, the man has arrived.

Young families have been moving to the suburbs for as long as there have been young families and suburbs. That many of the young families moving to New York suburbs should be Brooklynites, and that many of them should fancy themselves "creative types" and that they, like their parents and grandparents before them, should believe themselves capable of bringing their superior sensibilities to the land of compromises and comfort should come as no surprise. See: Revolutionary Road.

And yet, the New York Times has seen fit to print yet another style section feature on the suburban exodus of Brooklynites called, what else, "Creating Hipsturbia." After all, "Williamsburg on the Hudson" ran way back in August 2011.

What seems to be entirely lost on these suburban pioneers (and The Times) is that despite their tattoos and their gluten-free baked goods and their farm-to-table restaurants, they are following in the exact same footsteps as their forebearers. The creative types who have long condescended to settle in the small towns of the Hudson River Valley have always carried their tastes with them, along with the notion that they may be in the suburbs, but they are not of the suburbs.

This is the tragedy of the suburbs: they are populated, on the whole, by people who hate to think of themselves of suburban, who cannot stomach the idea that they have abandoned the promises of the city for the comforts of the hinterland. The kinds of people who like to think they are above those comforts—the cars, the lawns, the bigger, cheaper houses—even as they partake of them. Frank and April Wheeler, for all their pretensions and talk of Paris, are not the exceptions, they are the archetypes.

The Times is so busy looking at the surface of things that they fail to see the substance. The style signifiers sprinkled so conspicuously throughout the article—the Fernet Branca cocktails with clever names, the haute donuts covered in maple bacon, the artist who wears his hair in a top bun and "bears tattoos with his sons' names, Denim and Bowie, on his forearms"—are meaningless. The Brooklyn "brand"—so easily recognizable that we all understand what "six-person-minimum whole-pig dinners" and bars "festooned with Edison bulbs" connote—is an aesthetic and lifestyle sensibility that has already proven itself infinitely adaptable to any number of geographic settings.

Indeed, the Brooklyn aesthetic is so ubiquitous and slavishly adhered to that it displays all the suburban hallmarks that we love to deride. The conformity, the dull sameness, the utter lack of imagination. In his excellent 2005 essay I hate Brooklyn Jonathan Van Meter quotes one of his friends on Williamsburg: "It’s not that I don’t like the culturati hipsters, but the last time I was in an environment where people only wanted to be with people exactly like themselves was in a fucking mall in Minnesota, which is why I left there twenty years ago."

As Inga Saffron writes in The New Republic, the real problem with gentrification is that it drives out economic, racial and generational diversity, leaving a bland monoculture in its wake. Brooklyn is filled with hundreds of independent businesses so identical to one another that they may as well be chains. Farm-to-table restaurants and are the new Applebees and felted wool antlers are the new Thomas Kinkades.

More to the point, these "hipster" newcomers want the same things that everyone moving to the suburbs has ever wanted: more space for less money, better schools, a slower pace of life. They have young children, they have not become the artists or dancers or musicians they had hoped to become, they have reached the age when they no longer believe that they will, and they do not find the sacrifices demanded by city life worthwhile anymore.

That these young families are being pushed from the city by affluence, rather than poverty, is something worth exploring. The growing impossibility of maintaining anything resembling a middle-class existence in an increasingly upper-class city is a real and pressing problem. But the fresh-faced suburbanites interviewed for the article tell an age-old tale.

Williamsburg roof parties thumping at 3 a.m. were not compatible with raising two young children. The gifted and talented program at the local public school was not up to snuff. Williamsburg no longer seemed central to the life they were living or wanted to lead. They were looking for a more peaceful environment, the country life not far from the city. The suburbs afforded more space to pursue the hobbies so central to the Brooklyn D.I.Y movement.

Brooklyn, with its brownstones and backyards and leafy streets, has long been a proto-suburb for Manhattanites. That those who embraced the lower-density and less frenetic streets of Brooklyn should be drawn to suburban life is not surprising.

"To abandon the idea of Brooklyn is to admit that a certain idea of Brooklyn has died, or that they are no longer part of it," the article claims. On the contrary, rather than stifling one's ability to lead a "Brooklyn life," the suburbs are an ideal place for a culture that glorifies domesticity and revels in homemaking, in baking and butchering and knitting and soapmaking and quilting and letterpressing. The Brooklyn ideal is not the urban careerist, but the rural crafter. The most hardcore Brooklynites are the ones who never really wanted to be in the city in the first place.

As one formerly-urban soap maker who now enjoys "pajama jams" in her basement music studio tells The Times: "We keep to ourselves a lot more, keep to our hobbies a lot more, which for creative types is great."

Honestly, what better way to enhance the insular qualities so particular to the Brooklyn brand, to nurture the inward-looking, self-reflective culture, than to shut out all the noise and messiness of urban life?

It's all come full circle, a development augured when Martha Stewart, the homemaking doyenne of the 'burbs, became the patron saint of the Brooklyn craft crowd. The return to the suburbs—where many of the Brooklyn hipsters came from in the first place—is not a really a reverse migration. It's a homecoming.

kvelsey@observer.com

Today is the deadline for newsroom buyouts at The New York Times. So far, two more have accepted the deal.

Update (1:37 p.m.): Assistant managing editor Jim Roberts announced via his Twitter feed that he is leaving the Times. We don't know whether he has taken the buyout.

Original Post: Terry Schwadron, head of news operations, has decided to take the Times buyout, a source tells us. The announcement went out in an email to the newsroom this morning.

Mr. Schwadron, who came to The New York Times in 1998 from The Los Angeles Times, where he was deputy managing editor, served as the  editor for information and news technology at the Times for most of his time there. In that role, Mr. Schwadron advised and helped set the paper's social media policy.

New York Times sports editor Joseph Sexton also announced that he has accepted the buyout. Mr. Sexton will go to non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, as a senior editor. ProPublica's editor in chief, Stephen Engelberg, announced the move in a post this morning.

Yesterday, classical music editor Jim Oestreich announced that he would accept the buyout.

Executive editor Jill Abramson sent a memo, obtained by Politico, on to staffers about the layoffs last night. According to the memo, it will take a few days to figure out if the buyout process has been successful. "We will know a day or two after that whether or not we will have to go to layoffs in order to reach the savings we need," she wrote. So far, by our count, we are up to eight. According to Ms. Abramson's December announcement, the magic number is 30.

Meanwhile, the slow process has been a stressful one for the Times newsroom.

"Living with the uncertainty that this kind of process inevitably creates has been painful for us all," Ms. Abramson wrote. "And at the same time we are grappling with the sadness at the departure of friends, of wise and trusted colleagues and great journalists."

Photo credit: Twitter.

Classical music editor for The New York Times James Oestreich has accepted the paper's buyout and will retire at the end of the month from the New York Times. The departure, which was reported by Slipped Disc, a music blog, comes just one day before the buyout deadline.  

Mr. Oestreich, who turns 70 this year, will leave at the end of the month but will continue to advise the Times on classical music coverage through the spring and write for the paper on a freelance basis.

"As many of you have heard me say (perhaps ad nauseam), this has been a dream job," Mr.  Oestreich wrote in an email announcement obtained by Slipped Disc. But like all dreams, one eventually wakes up.

"The opportunity to do this work, in a field and on behalf of an art form that I truly love, at The Times – an institution for which my respect, impossibly high to begin with, has nevertheless grown through years of seeing it in action – was a privilege beyond measure," Mr. Oestreich continued. "That this privilege has also been all-consuming will come as no surprise to colleagues in the newsroom, and I am excited about the prospect (finally) of balancing my life with a bit of teaching, other writing and maybe even a book project."

By our count, this brings the total number of eligible Times staff taking advantage of the buyout offer to six. According to executive editor Jill Abramson's December announcement, the total number needs to get to 30 to avoid layoffs.

Know more? Email us: ksmoke@observer.com

Managing editor John Geddes, who noted in his departure memo that he had served under four executive editors, announced that he was taking the buyout, though he was unclear on his future plans.

“I’m moving on,” Mr. Geddes wrote. “I’ve arrived at that magical spot where a buyout offer miraculously appears and presents me with new opportunities. Yes, yes, I know everyone says you have to do this carefully and be armed with a plan, but I don’t have one—not yet.”

Joyce Wadler, the original boldfaced-name columnist, also announced her decision to take a buyout last week. The announcement was included in a longer housekeeping email to Times staff, noting that Ms. Wadler will leave the Times to pursue her passion: humor writing.

Editor Alice DuBois decided that she was going to take the buyout and move to BuzzFeed. Ms. DuBois has been at the Times since 2000, most recently as editor for special projects and development. At BuzzFeed, she will help improve the website’s content management system as a product lead for editorial tools.

“Alice is one of those unique individuals who has a ton of editorial smarts, a great design sense and a deep understanding of and respect for technology,” Times editor for emerging platforms Fiona Spruill wrote in a staff memo obtained by Politico.

Meanwhile, assistant managing editor Jonathan Landman and reporter Jacques Steinberg also announced their departures earlier this month.

Outside the newsroom, Times P.R. chief Bob Christie announced that he was leaving the paper after running corporate communications for the past three years.

“My position was eliminated as part of company wide cost cutting,” Mr. Christie wrote in an email to Off the Record. The Times has no plans to replace Mr. Christie.

With one day left before the deadline, there are probably more departures in the works, although we appear to be a long way off from the 30 takers management was hoping to attract.

However, the big winner here might be Times CEO Mark Thompson, who came to the paper last November bearing the since largely forgotten taint of the BBC Newsnight scandal. If you recall, Mr. Thompson’s customary meet-and-greet town halls were originally scheduled for mid-December, then pushed back to “early 2013” as news of the buyouts broke and the BBC scandal loomed. According to a Times spokesperson, the town halls are still scheduled for the first quarter, although the company had “no firm dates to share yet.” Still, no staffers we spoke to had heard anything about them, and the matter seems to have slipped through the cracks.