Say what you want about New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who announced yesterday (left) the newspaper would be cutting 100 newsroom positions this year. But the guy gives a damn good bad-news speech. "We-all of us-have taken a badly wounded, publicly humiliated newsroom and restored it, largely by dint of great journalism, to a position of international esteem," Keller told his audience. "And we have done all of this while avoiding the cutting of muscle that has so badly weakened many of our competitors. Smugness, in our business, is death." Good line! "You pour your talent into this great miracle, and I am proud to be part of it." Aww. Feel inspired? Want to go change the world? Yeah! If you still have a job next month, you should totally go for it! After the jump, some key points from the in-house transcript of Keller's speech, which follows in full.

According to a New York Times staffer who spoke to Gawker, the first major newsroom layoffs at the Times didn't surprise the 200 employees who got the news this morning from executive editor Bill Keller at his annual "Throw Stuff At Bill" meeting. "In some ways it was anticlimactic," the staffer said, noting that "it's stunning" how many Timesers sit around on their hands all day. Funny, this stuns us not at all! During the meeting, Keller mentioned the crummy economy and industry as a reason for the cuts. He also spent a good deal of time discussing how the Times could beat Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, or, as Keller put it today, "The New York Times Lite." Ouch. "We would be fools to underreact or to overreact," Keller was said to pronounce. "We cannot win by being defensive, we cannot curl up and act that way." Oooh! It's a real-live newspaper war!

By year's end, the New York Times will cut 100 newsroom positions, executive editor Bill Keller announced this morning at his regular "Throw Stuff At Bill" meeting. "At the end of the year, the newsroom will be smaller than it is now," Keller told the group, warning that staffers should prepare for layoffs. "The newsroom leadership will share in the sacrifice," he said, according to an attendee. When the Times announced the elimination of a dozen support positions last fall, Keller said the paper would cut "a few management jobs in administrative areas," a far cry from today's announcement. Despite the planned cuts, Keller said today, the Times will still have 150 more newsroom staffers than any other paper; spokeslady Catherine Mathis tells Jeff Bercovici the newsroom's staff is currently 1,332. "As you know, we have not been reducing our staff. It's been quite the opposite," she told him. "We've been increasing the number of newsroom staff. [But] right now we're in the midst of a very difficult time in the business." Well that's odd. During the December cuts, Keller said something completely different!

Currently a New York Times reporter, Keller was the executive editor of the paper from 2003-2011.

John McCain is getting pushy with the New York Times over a Jim Rutenberg story he wants killed, according to Drudge. The planned piece, six weeks in the making, alleges that McCain gave special treatment to a lady lobbyist over pending telecom legislation. "Rutenberg had hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday, sources reveal, but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about jounalism [sic] ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election," Drudge says. Drama! Also—convenient! Makes us totally forget about yesterday's news that the Times had acceded to a White House request to change the subhed on their CIA story.

About an hour ago, New York Times staffers received a holiday gift from executive editor Bill Keller—an announcement of layoffs! The cuts will come from the newsroom "for the first time in recent memory," according to the memo. A dozen "support positions" will be eliminated from the newsroom, along with "a number" of clerical administrative jobs; next year, several admin management positions will be cut. The Times apparently put a hiring freeze into place several weeks ago, and "except for those jobs that are critically important to our future ambitions, we intend to enforce it," Keller writes. Full memo after the jump.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller finished War & Peace yesterday! Which means he read he the whole thing in a week, while gallivanting around Iowa following Presidential campaigns and comparing all the candidates to doomed Tolstoy figures and imaging old Leo "tut-tutting from the press section" at all the idiot Iowans foolish enough to believe that the suit they nominate will have any power to affect the inexorable march of history. ['War and Peace' on the Campaign Trail [NYT]

Last week, Keith Kelly claimed that the New York Times will finally end the long national joke that is TimesSelect—you just know Maureen Dowd is cursing those Freakonomics guys right now for being able to refuse to have their blog behind the TimesSelect pay wall!—and a quick look at the just-out July numbers confirms that the core group of 225,000 or so people who signed up to pay for the service in the first place are pretty much the same people who still subscribe. (Everyone else either gets it free as part of their home delivery service, or as part of a college/university deal.) Whenever it does get shut down, it'll be a speck of egg on the faces of Times CEO Janet Robinson and Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. But the failure of TimesSelect is probably the least of their worries right now: Their ad revenue, especially in the Regional Media Group (all those little papers they own in places like Lakeland, Florida) and classifieds across the board, is having a bit of a summer slump.

Now that every department at the New York Times has moved into the new building, you're probably wondering where everyone has gone! So let's go floor-by-floor, shall we? And as we work our way up, we'll see who really matters in the Times organization.

Last evening, the staff of the New York Times bid their old building at 229 West 43rd St. one final farewell. Staffers were allowed to bring one guest and were asked to bring their own food and wine (beer and soft drinks were readily available), though it turned out that Pinch had sprung for a whole bunch of pizza. Whew. Our correspondent reports that Metro editor Joe Sexton has some sweet hip-hop moves. Get your head around that one. The full report follows!

Yesterday, a Times internal memo went around outlining the paper's upcoming width shrinkage. (It's happening August 6.) But there are a few curious items in the memo that seem to be at odds with what's been proposed in the past.

The New York Times will at last slim down, circumcising an inch and a half of width. Which should help Bill Keller's whole "write shorter stories" campaign. [NYO]

• We took one last look at the Look Book.
  

Today the New York Times held its "Throw Stuff at Bill" (that would be Keller!) meetings—one this morning and two this afternoon. We got a report about the early afternoon session, and learned that the future of the Times is all about Sewell Chan, among other things.

Yesterday, as the news of the Pulitzer Prizes drifted out into the media, the mood at the New York Times was relatively somber. True, the paper had won a prize, for Andrea Elliott's series on an imam in Brooklyn, but had not turned up as the winner in any other category—which, for a paper that's grown accustomed to multiple awards over the years, must have been a bit of a sting. In fact, it kind of was. In a speech to the newsroom after the awards were announced, Bill Keller had the following to say:

Okay, so Times executive editor Bill Keller doesn't really fetishize Nicolas Ghesqui re's inventive prints. "I'm a fan of blue jeans and T-shirts," he told WWD yesterday. So what was he doing in the front row at Balenciaga? Something to do with "a new level of editorial marketing amid stiff competition for readers and ad dollars," WWD surmises. Keller addressed Times critic Cathy Horyn's recent banning from Dolce & Gabbana (and her rumored pending ban from Vera Wang): "I always think that's self-defeating when they shut out the journalists." Well put, sir! He'll be wearing a deconstructed feathered corset by the end of the week, we just know it. This is just like his Baghdad tour, only less dangerous!

Well, Bill Keller—pictured here with A Nameless Employee at the Balenciaga show in Paris this week—has only been the executive editor of the New York Times since 2003. But still, doesn't everyone know how passionately interested he's always been in Nicolas Ghesqui re's multiethnic fabric references?

This week in "Ahead of the Times," the high school newspaper-style New York Times internal fun-sheet, we learn that packing up for the new headquarters has begun. Also, the new cafeteria—opening in April with an espresso cafe!—will be WiFi-rific but cash-free. It's the future! No money allowed! So Bill Keller is personally going around injecting debit chips in everybody's necks.

• Who will succeed Bill Keller as Times executive editor: Jill Abramson or Dean Baquet? Get set for the inevitable Hillary-Obama comparisons. Either way, oddly, the real job worth having seven years from now will be digital fella Jon Landman's. [WWD]
  

So much of what we do is dependent on the help of you, the reader—the leaked memo here, the rumor there, the appropriately-timed photo anywhere. Still, sometimes our readers can be a tad overzealous, like the one who snapped this photo of Times Executive Editor Bill Keller having lunch at that paper's cafeteria with incoming Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet. Oh, you know what, we're still totally charmed. Plus, it's a very rare sighting of Keller in the cafeteria. We've labeled all the participants we were able to identify to make it easier for you. If anyone can help identify the gentleman in the rear at the far right, with the glasses, we'd love to know. He seems a little devious or something.