From: Slattery, Kathleen Sent: Fri 10/20/2006 1:14 PM Subject: WARN notice- Guild

October 20, 2006
Dear Colleagues:

As your Division Vice President shared with you earlier today, we plan on eliminating 101 positions by December 19th.

The rest of the e-mail is after the jump.

You are receiving this email because under California law, if an employer lays off fifty or more employees within a thirty day period, it is required to provide the affected employees with a sixty day advance notice of the layoff. This is known as a "WARN notice."

Not every potentially affected employee receiving the notice will ultimately be subject to layoff. But in order to meet compliance requirements, notice will be given to a larger number than 101 employees.

Attached is the 60-day WARN notice as well as a Q&A on benefits, severance and final pay, which are also being mailed to the most current address you
have provided us.

Please let me know if you have further questions.

-Kathleen

Kathleen Slattery
VP HR and Labor Relations, San Jose Mercury News

Part of the Q&A attachment reads:

Q: If I am laid off what will be my last day of employment? A: December 19, 2006, but you may be notified earlier.

Q: If an employee resigns, will that count against the required number of layoffs?
A: It could, if it were in a department that did not need to fill the position.

Q: How many positions are being eliminated?
A: 101.

The San Jose Mercury News is shuttering its tech blog, SiliconBeat, which (along with Good Morning Silicon Valley) displayed the insight and cleverness that the Merc News itself is missing.

Co-author Matt Marshall is leaving the Merc to launch VentureBeat, an independent blog about Silicon Valley ventures. As of press time, the site's down, so give the site a moment to recover from first-day traffic. Judging by Marshall's past work, it'll be a blog worth following, at least for the laughs.

SiliconBeat to retire...VentureBeat has launched! [SiliconBeat]
VentureBeat Launches [VentureBeat]

• San Francisco PR firm Bite interviews the San Jose Mercury News senior web editor about the Merc's new media offerings. Sez the editor about the popularity of the Merc's American Idol blog, "Compelling content still rules the day." And by "compelling content," he means "celebrity trash." (Gawker Media heartily agrees.) [Bitemarks]
• A reader responds to the Apple shared bathroom incident: "SCO (a.k.a. Santa Cruz Operation), when it was still in Santa Cruz, posted similar signs after customers on a late tour of the facility suprised a group of nude hot-tubers. good times."
• USA Today manages to sound like it reads books, and it gives tepid approval to Douglas Coupland's JPod, a novel about game developers that outclasses his '95 novel Microserfs. [USA Today]
• SF Chron tech blogger Alan Saracevic asks about the $100 laptop (meant to put a computer in the hands of every child), "Why does everyone need a laptop?" So we can get more blog traffic, Alan. Geez, catch up with everyone, okay? [SF Gate]
• The Boob Nazi battle on LiveJournal — where militant breastfeeders fight LJ's abuse team — gets attention on the LJ Abuse Blog, which calls the affair "Nipplegate." [Exposing LJ Abuse — NSFW]