Cut top talent, and what do you get?

The New York Times' David Carr writes a wonderful column about the recent trend of newspapers cutting their top (and highest paid) talent to save the money they'd otherwise have to pay their oldest and most experienced writers.

He writes:

Yes, the revenue picture is grim and growing grimmer. The biggest outlay besides putting the printed artifact on the street is salaries. And journalists tend to get a lot more indignant when the sheet cake and goodbye speeches are being served up on behalf of people who have the same job as they have.

But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

In my local market, the Burlington Free Press let go one of its columnists, Ed Shamy, who wrote funny, sarcastic and always enjoyable columns about life in Vermont. If the paper explained why they picked him to cut, I missed it. But the end result is the newspaper is less interesting to read, has less relevance for local readers, and has lost a strong voice that helped define what it means to live here.