The Post's Keith Kelly has been keeping close watch on the Times' recently-completed cull of 100 editorial staffers. He puts the number pushed out involuntarily at 15. Meanwhile the Newspaper Guild has filed a grievance over the way the cuts were carried out, and offered to negotiate better severance for older laid-off newsroom employees.

The New York Times-reeling with the rest of the newspaper industry as advertising dollars and readers shift to the web-has completed its first ever newsroom layoffs. Editor Bill Keller told staff this morning that the newspaper had completed the cull of about 100 reporters and editors it began earlier this year.

Bear Stearns might lay off 10,000 employees as it's subsumed by JP Morgan. But it's the Wall Street kind of layoff, where you get nine months pay and one-third of last year's bonus. Why the hell are we bloggers again? [Dealbreaker]

Akimbo has laid off nearly everyone except for its executives, according to a tip we just received. An early entrant in the TV-over-Internet field, Akimbo saw its original CEO Joshua Goldman leave for the luxury of investing in other video startups. The company dumped its set-top box business to sell Internet video-on-demand software to other hardware manufacturers. So far $47 million has been poured into the company by the likes of Cisco Systems, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Kleiner Perkins' William R. Hearst III, who serves on Akimbo's board. Any Akimbo employees out there want to confirm or contradict our tipster's impression that CEO Tom Frank and COO Neil Goldberg are mismanaging the aging startup?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has scheduled a "town hall" meeting for Microsoft employees tomorrow at 9 a.m. The subject of Yahoo will probably come up, but why would Microsoft employees beyond executives care?

During proceedings in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo's board, Microsoft lawyers said that the company has set aside $1.5 billion to retain Yahoo employees. This cash is separate from a Yahoo board-approved severance package that guarantees two years' pay to anybody laid off after a change in control. Already, two-thirds of our readers said they would prefer to see Yahoo merge with Microsoft instead of AOL. Sources confirm the sentiment is similar inside of Yahoo. (Photo, "Free Man's Prison," by code_martial)

The Capital Times, the 90-year-old daily afternoon newspaper of Madison, Wisconsin, is eliminating its print edition and becoming an online-only publication. While the Times was once a legendary voice of enlightened progressivism, battling Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and serving as a voice to Madison's notoriously liberal citizenry, the new electronic edition of the paper will mostly be based around a local web portal and entertainment listings, as that's where the ad money is. More than 20 newsroom staffers lost their jobs, with each now-former journalist receiving a profile written, apparently, by one of their laid-off colleagues, in some sort of sick newspaper-shuttering Bataan Death March. [NYT, Shilv.org]

The Times is short of its goal of 100 staff buyouts, so 30 newsroom staff will likely be laid off in the next month. This would be "the company's first-ever mass firing of journalists in its 156-year history," according to Keith Kelly at the Post. But there's a chance that number could be reduced, since the Newspaper Guild has yet to obtain an official count - Kelly's number is based on his own inside sources. In any case, it looks like the cuts may very well fall on the feisty Metro desk, which has turbocharged the paper's internet presence and is probably the last place the paper should be cutting:

AOL will layoff "less than 500" from its Platform-A advertising division starting today. The severance packages "stink," a source tells Silicon Alley Insider . AOL calls the cuts an ongoing "alignment," not a layoff, and suggests the number headed for the street is closer to 100.

The following email was sent by the deputy editor of The Straits Times, an English language newspaper in the only growing market for print papers left: Asia. Singapore, specifically. The editor would like to know if maybe anyone who is going to get laid off from the New York Times would like to go work in a country whose "press freedom ranks below Nigeria and just ahead of Russia." They are in dire need of copy-editors, apparently! The last couple were maybe caned? Email below, via Thomas Crampton.

Sad news to report. The rumors that we heard earlier this afternoon about impending layoffs at The House That Freddy Built have come to fruition. Variety is reporting that Time Warner is pinkslipping 450 New Line staffers, a number that equates to nearly 90% of their current payroll, as the newly scaled-down shingle merges into the larger Warner Bros fold. The worst part? Although notifications of the dismissals began earlier this afternoon, they won't be completed until tomorrow, which means that a number of employees will be spending the evening unsure as to whether or not they'll even have a job at this time tomorrow. Synergy just ain't what it used to be. If you hear or see anything else (memos, etc.), please send 'em our way. [Variety]

Nielsen Business Media—which publishes Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Editor & Publisher and the Hollywood Reporter—is laying off "between 40-50 staffers," including people from the editorial departments of all of those publications. :( We've known Adweek's in trouble. They've cut back to 36 issues a year, lost staffers they haven't bothered to replace, and suffered under the regime of cruel editress Alison Fahey. Any more info on who's been hit? Let us know. [Folio, Agency Spy]

Chipmaker AMD is cutting 10 percent of its workforce, about 1,650 jobs. Just last month the company axed 800 workers. The proximate cause: a prolonged price war between intel and AMD, lengthened by AMD's late introduction of a high-end chip for servers. [WSJ]

A Symantec employee tells us that on April 18, management will cut most of the company's engineers in Durham, North Carolina and over a third of its Mountain View workforce. "This is not unexpected," our tipster tells us. "Since the merger of Veritas and Symantec there has been a layoff each spring and fall." Employees have, however, confronted management to ask why a software security firm would lay of security developers first.

Visto CEO Brian Bogosian likes to tell reporters to expect an IPO soon. But first: layoffs. The mobile email company will cut its London workforce by a third, laying off "senior IT staff, development, product services and pre-sales workers," reports the Register.

Google offered laid-off DoubleClick employees two options: take two months pay and find work at a competitor or take four months pay and join another industry. Some lucky DoubleClick employees were offered contract positions, which means they have to head to the elevator and buy lunch on the streets every day just like any other non-Googler. Meanwhile, further downtown on Wall Street, MBA grads who recently won jobs at the crashed-and-burned Bear Stearns won't get them. The company has rescinded its offers, reports SAI. But JPMorgan Chase — the company that bailed out Bear Stearns — will still pay the no-longer-needed new hires their promised $50,000 to $60,000 relocation bonuses and offer them career services.

San Francisco-based online and catalog retailer RedEnvelope, abandoned by its CEO and its bank, has laid off substantially all of its 200-some employees, we hear. The website is expected to go offline Friday morning. The company, founded in 1997 and taken public in 2003, was hit by woes both old and new. For an e-commerce business, it was slow to embrace change, relying too long on its printed catalogs, and failing to embrace even the most basic techniques of acquiring customers online.

Dell will lay off more than the 8,800 employees it originally estimated last year, CEO Michael Dell told analysts. Since last year, the company has fired 3,200. Another 900 will go with the impending closure of an Austin, Texas factory. [WSJ]

A select few of the 300 DoubleClick employees Google laid off yesterday will be placed into "transitional roles" and offered contract positions, reports the WSJ. That's not much of a reprieve. Google HR makes contractors sign agreements to abide by strict rules. They're not allowed to " use massage chairs, videogames, pool tables, foosball tables or other entertainment facilities on Google's campus," according to one such agreement leaked to us. Probably won't get to eat the food, either. Read the whole thing below:

Google plans to sell DoubleClick's search engine marketing division. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to our mission and core to the trust we ask from our users," Google's DoubleClick integration boss Tom Phillips wrote on the company's blog. In the '80s, Phillips ran a magazine called Spy which would have skewered him for such carefully groomed language. [WSJ]