I'm sure that for people at Red Herring, the troubled tech publication that has difficulty paying its bills, updating its masthead has long been the lowest priority. The list of staffers has seemed out of date every time I've checked. It has changed recently, I note — but not fast enough to track of the latest round of departures. Red Herring board members got an eyeful of the shrinking masthead when they arrived at the office last Friday and were greeted by a nearly empty newsroom. Even people still on payroll — whatever "payroll" means at the Herring — are often absent, ostensibly for "health reasons" (translation: job interviews). After the jump, a list of the fish who we hear have jumped out of the pond — or are trying to do so.

Still on deathwatch, Red Herring, the once-storied tech publication, is displaying its straitened circumstances even in its copy. The few articles on its website that aren't Reuters wire stories seem to be written by a skeleton crew, with equally skeletal thought behind them. Take, for example, Cassimir Medford's puff piece on Ooma, the also-doomed VOIP startup. Medford, ostensibly Red Herring's "telecom and wireless reporter," includes this doozy:

For Earth2Tech, the new green blog from GigaOm, founder Om Malik has hired Adena DeMonte away from the Red Herring, the struggling publication we've put on a deathwatch. That's got to be the last straw for Herring editor Joel Dreyfuss (pictured, right). Rumor has it that Dreyfuss at one point told Malik to stop poaching the Herring's best writers. Malik, of course, is a former Herring writer, but the publication in its current form and under current management bears no relationship, aside from the name, to the storied tech magazine Malik worked for earlier in this decade. Why Dreyfuss feels Malik's not entitled to fish in his pond is a mystery to me — unless it's just a sign of his general frustration with trying to bail out a sinking ship.