So a double-super-secret source deep within the Time & Life Building explains how the buyout portion of the Time Inc. job cuts will work. Seems that under union rules, the company has to accept voluntarily buyouts for two weeks before it can start laying people off involuntarily. People who take the offer get a payout calculated by a formula involving some mix of current salary and years of service. Last time there were layoffs the company offered people over 50 or with more than 15 years of service an extra 5 years' credit toward their pension as an inducement to pack it in; this time, there's no such offer.

Mediaweek is reporting — and Time Inc. management just confirmed to us — the death toll at 1271 Sixth Avenue today.

Sometimes, we get a little ashamed of ourselves that we have only a bachelor's degree. Sometimes, we find ourselves wishing just a little bit that we had an Ivy League degree. Sometimes, we think it'd be nice to have a real job at a real media organization, from which we got employer-paid health and dental, and sick days, and maybe even a Town Car home every now and then. And sometimes we think we probably could have accomplished all these things if we'd just gone to Columbia Journalism School.

It's no secret they were coming, and now, apparently, they're here. This email just in from the Time & Life Building:

The latest rumors we're hearing out of The New York Sun only serve to remind us of the degree to which the place is just like your college paper — people look at it but don't actually read it, it's guided by the presiding editor's odd preoccupations, subeditors are forever drafting manifestoes on how to improve the place — but likely with a smaller circulation.

Two days after a trio of big promotions in the Times's Washburo, Romenesko this afternoon catches a memo announcing a trio of big promotions up at NYT HQ.

We reported Monday on the Great Cafeteria Switchover of 2006 underway at The New York Times — it seems the Times Co., in its infinite nickel-pinching wisdom, outsourced food-service duties to Restaurant Associates, which promptly canned many longtime employees. The Upper West Siders who staff the paper know they should detest this, and yet they're conflicted. A Timesperson submits this early report:

What's another day in mediaville without a few more people quitting/resigning/being fired /getting laid off/fleeing? Today's two reports:

Time's cover this week is a largely glowing profile of Bill Ford, the environmentally inclined Ford Motor scion who, as the display type says, "believes a green revolution can fix his family's troubled company."

Big changes afoot — big, outsourcing, job-costing changes afoot — at the New York Times cafeteria. Word came Friday:

Because we all like to watch, Gawker is looking to develop some original video content. Think mini-documentaries on crack: watching the media wanks slide in and out of Michael's, screwing with the Condé security desk, or going undercover to document the horror of a book party.

Here's one you won't find on Gawker Jobs:

One of us has held seven different fulltime media jobs over seven and a half years in New York. So, obviously, we like looking for new jobs — and we're betting you do too. As part of Gawker Media's ongoing effort to ensure you're as unproductive and useless to your employer as possible, we're now very proud to introduce Gawker Jobs.

As much of the city sleeps today, there's all sorts of exciting news at the two local dailies you're least likely to read.

As big labor's big hero, Roger Toussaint, goes around the city receiving rockstar-like welcomes and begging for money with which to pay TWU 100's millions of dollars in fines, it's important to remember not just lazy blue-collar workers who benefit from union protection. Lazy white-collar workers can benefit, too — and, as we all know, there are no white-collar workers lazier than magazine writers. Which is exactly what Time Inc.'s Newspaper Guild local wants all the magazine publisher's employees to remember.

You know how those run-of-the-mill beat cops — young guys, presumably rookies — standing around on, say, the West Fourth subway platform or near the Astor Place cube, just keeping an eye on things, always seem thoroughly unhappy? How sometimes you start to feel a little Bedford Fallsish and try to catch their eye as you walk past so you can say, "Mornin', officer," but they always sullenly look away? We always assumed that's because, well, they're New Yorkers, and New Yorkers are always a little bit sullen, and also because it must suck to spend hours at a time standing up, walking around, in the cold, and not really doing anything.

Last time we were inside the Reuters building, typically mild-mannered journalists who work for the news service were wandering through the crowd to distribute flyers bearing various sorts of union agitprop. That was because the reporters there went more than two years without a contract after the last one expired, and the union had already rejected one proffered deal. Last month, final, the two sides came to agreement. Then a memo arrived in New York Reuters staffers' inboxs today. The highlight:

Fortune is out today with its annual list of the 100 best companies in the United States to work for — Genentech is best; Wegmans supermarkets are No. 2 — and the press release touting the list hails the attributes that make these companies so great, including a secure and supportive workplace culture, profit sharing, and minimally hierarchical corporate structure.

Spencer Morgan — a gossip reporter around town who's worked on New York's Intelligencer and Rush & Molloy at the News, among other venues — published a delightful essay in Wednesday's Observer. "My New Year's Rez: How to Play Hooky and Not Get Fired," it was called, and it provided charmingly dastardly strategies for availing oneself of sick days when not actually sick. His suggestions, in brief:

Today's Daily News warmly — even sycophantically — welcomes the latest top executive Mort Zuckerman has lured to the paper, Marc Kramer. He joins as as CEO to replace recently defected COO Les Goodstein, who, apparently lacking any sort of meaningful non-compete in his contract, skedaddled to the Post and News Corp just last week. Kramer was at the News previously, as a labor lawyer in the '90s, before he decamped to The New York Times, from which he now returns.