But, oh, to be a fly on the wall of a recent staff meeting at a local daily publication. In a sort of St. Crispin's Day for the newsprint set, their reptile-vanquishing leader announced that despite a 47% reduction in staff, said publication is still going strong. Sure, sure, any of us who worked in the early aughts heard this same speech, but what follows is where we choked on our sesame bagel. Our source lays it out thusly:

So, he tells us all this stuff about how much money we're saving by canning all these guys, and then he announces that we're still going strong, because we've made seven hires in the last six weeks. And then he makes this big dramatic pause and said "and every one of these hires was a person of color."

Hell, some of our best friends are "people of color"! Where's our damn prize? Seriously, what year is it? Where do we live, again?

And if that's not misguided enough, another source tells us that at that same staff meeting, he who tussles with lizards announced that the future of the publication lies in video (yes, and the future of SFist lies in beer, if things go as we plan tonight), and that they've hired a (presumably colorful) videographer for that very purpose. Squamata-squasher even brought up an expectation that their website would eventually charge for content, video and otherwise.

We'll just say this: When said local publication makes the move to f**k up their one successful business unit, their (really, quite good) website, by charging for content, your non-ethnically-profiled staff at SFist will be ready and willing to serve the audience they will lose with this bonehead move. We're putting an extra leaf in the table, because we suspect a lot more folks are gonna be coming to dinner chez SFist.

(emphasis ours)