NPR News announced Wednesday that it is canceling two daily radio programs — Day to Day and News and Notes — as part of a broader effort by the company to close a projected budget shortfall of $23 million for its current fiscal year. Overall, NPR will cut 7 percent of its work force and slash expenses further around the company.

The story adds:

Day to Day was designed as a midday complement to mainstays Morning Edition and All Things Considered, while News and Notes, a successor to The Tavis Smiley Show, was intended to draw more African-American listeners. Beyond the two shows, another 12 journalists will lose their jobs throughout NPR News.

Companywide, NPR is laying off 64 people and eliminating 21 other positions that are currently vacant. NPR News will still have more than 800 employees on staff, including about 300 journalists. . . .

Interest payments from an endowment created from the bequest of the late Joan Kroc, which have typically paid out about $10 million a year to NPR, were wiped out by the sharp downturn in the financial markets. However, NPR’s board authorized the company to draw down $15 million from the company’s operating reserves, most of which also came from the Kroc gift.

In interviews, company officials said they decided to try to make big, specific cuts to mitigate their effect on NPR’s ability to gather and report the news.

Update: Here is more from the Washington Post and here from The New York Times.

“That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Then Holt as if to brush off the citizen critics writes:

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

Then he gets down right patronizing when he adds:

This is a decision I would not have made. But it is not the end of the world. Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down.

Sitting in your position of power, Clark, you might not know it or feel it, but in this era of waterboarding etc. it is pretty damn tough to take a deep breath and calm down.

Here is what I would have done, insteading of retrieving probably one of the nuttiest letters to prove a point, I would have run all the letters they received. All 700 right here on the web, what does it cost? Almost nothing.

Instead Hoyt decides to treat 700 of The New York Times readers, dedicated enough to take a stand, as if they are little children, or worse nut cases, and worse still, apparently in his mind, liberal nut cases. 

• McCain’s campaign is doomed.
• Clinton’s nomination is inevitable.
• Obama is too effete and inexperienced to win.
• Giuliani is running surprisingly strong.
• Huckabee has no shot.

He adds:

Watching the cable channels cover Tuesday night’s results, I was struck by how little anyone told me about why people in New Hampshire voted as they did. At one point, I heard the briefest of snippets on one channel that exit polls showed New Hampshire voters had been most concerned with the economy. And yes, I saw charts that told me Clinton had reclaimed much of the women’s vote she had lost to Obama in Iowa.
 
But no one was telling me why.

The argument used to be bloggers vs. journalists, now it is bloggers vs. blowhards. Here is my solution, give each of the pundits a blog, that’s it. No national pedestal unless they build one. Save the national pedestal for the real journalists who are collecting information and helping us understand the world around us.  

Update: Somehow this post crashed and most of the original disappeared and I had to rebuild it as best I could from memory.

 For more ConvergeSouth 2007 videos by Leonard Witt on the future of journalism , see:

1. Jason Calacanis Cold to Local Newspapers as Business

2. Buck the Trend; Start a Newspaper Now

3. Want Science News? Start Your Own Publication 

4. Will Bunch Sees Different, Bright Journalism Future

I see the need for our editorial pages, like the rest of the newspaper, to concentrate more heavily than ever on local, state and regional issues. This is where we can stake a claim like no other media can.

Our readers can go to many places to get informed opinion on the Iraq war or global warming. But there are very few places they can go for expert opinion on local issues. And that is where I want us to dwell, with the active participation of our readers.

It is true readers can go many places for informed opinion, but having lived in Minneapolis for 18 years, I can tell you there is a sensibility there that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. I would say the same is true in other places where I have lived, including New Hampshire (Live Free or Die), New York City, Allentown, Pennsylvania and now Marietta, Georgia. The Star Tribune is still the largest Minnesota platform to reflect that local sensibility, even when it comes to national or international issues. To take away that platform away, doesn’t enhance a sense of the local rather it diminishes it. Instead of seeing those national and international events through the sensibilities of someone who has her pulse on Minnesota, local people’s opinions will be informed by someone else, somewhere else.

Of course, this will be one more step towards making regionable papers even more irrelevant. The best writers and the most solid readers will continue to gravitate to the web. Maybe they’ll go to the Minnesota Monitor where former Star Tribune opinion writer Jim Boyd had his own say about the Star Tribune’s new policy.