Does Ricky Gervais work at the DMN?

As promised, Belo released two memos this morning with a lot of words about their strategy and their circulation investigation, which is the sort of thing that publicly held companies have to do.

There's a lot of the usual corpra-babble in here, but here's what's interesting for us:

• Belo's workforce will be reduced by approximately 250 positions by November 1, with the majority coming from The Dallas Morning News. Belo's total revenue from all sources in the Dallas/Fort Worth market has been essentially flat since 2001, making changes in the expense structures of The Morning News and WFAA-TV, Belo's ABC affiliate in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, necessary.

Like we said, not exactly staffing up Metro. Reading that statement as conservatively as possible, they're cutting at least 126 people at the DMN; probably more like 200.

I submit that we can produce a more useful product than the DMN with less than 200 people. Wish we knew where the cuts were coming -- if enough are in News, I'd say that we could produce our products exclusively with our management team and the laid-off Belo-ites.

At least the Belo brass were sensitive enough to throw the fearful masses this bone:

• A review of the Company's executive compensation plans, particularly their bonus structures, is being conducted to ensure that the Company continues to maximize performance and that appropriate incentives are in place to retain Belo's most talented executives.

The rank-and-filers must be so relieved. Regardless of what it really means (and who can tell), it comes off like that episode of  The Office where David Brent tells the staff that the bad news is that they're being downsized; the good news is he's being promoted.

---

UPDATE: Seriously, if any of you laid-off Belo-ites want to use the time covered by your severance package to stick it to the man, drop us a line.

We don't have any paid positions available yet, but apparently neither does "one of the nation's largest media companies with a diversified group of market-leading television, newspaper, cable and interactive media assets."

How better to bounce back from a layoff than to help create the competition? We could use some smart folks to help us refine the launch plan and to help design our prototypes.