From October 3, 2008…

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5058760/valleywag-cuts-60-percent-of-staff

The above link is directly from Gawker.  It’s the full email Nick Denton sent to the editorial team.

Below is what was printed in Inc. Magazine in their December 2008 issue but I can’t find it anywhere on Inc.com.  I haven’t searched that hard.

Weird that Nick Denton’s layoff email didn’t post (or break) anywhere quicker online outside of Gawker.com, eh?

“I have some bad news. Here’s the heart of it: we are cutting 19 of our 133 editorial positions and suspending bonus payments at the start of next year… I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs…I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn. But there is no escaping the fact that we’re losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break — starting with this email, which you are free to leak.”

Seems like a pretty unnecessarily bleak outlook.   Maybe online advertisers should reach out to someone and figure out how to make money.  You can only make money by showing ROI.  Emails are pretty simple to send.