Yahoo laid off more than a thousand people last week, including Jeff Bonforte, a vice president whose job was rendered superfluous long before he was made redundant. Now we learn that he's taken the job of CEO at Xobni, a promising email startup. Curious: Did Xobni make a snap decision to hire Bonforte? Unlikely. Instead of quitting to take the job at Xobni, he waited to extract a package from Yahoo. Yahoo's shareholders and his ex-colleagues might not share our view, but we applaud Bonforte's cynical opportunism.

Say what you want about New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who announced yesterday (left) the newspaper would be cutting 100 newsroom positions this year. But the guy gives a damn good bad-news speech. "We-all of us-have taken a badly wounded, publicly humiliated newsroom and restored it, largely by dint of great journalism, to a position of international esteem," Keller told his audience. "And we have done all of this while avoiding the cutting of muscle that has so badly weakened many of our competitors. Smugness, in our business, is death." Good line! "You pour your talent into this great miracle, and I am proud to be part of it." Aww. Feel inspired? Want to go change the world? Yeah! If you still have a job next month, you should totally go for it! After the jump, some key points from the in-house transcript of Keller's speech, which follows in full.

U.S. and India, Yahoo HR is now working its way to Europe. A tipster writes in:

Reggie Davis, the attorney booted from Yahoo's legal team and granted a face-saving job monitoring fraudulent clicks on Yahoo's ad network, was not laid off, as a tipster told us. Here's how he told his staff he's still on the job:

According to a New York Times staffer who spoke to Gawker, the first major newsroom layoffs at the Times didn't surprise the 200 employees who got the news this morning from executive editor Bill Keller at his annual "Throw Stuff At Bill" meeting. "In some ways it was anticlimactic," the staffer said, noting that "it's stunning" how many Timesers sit around on their hands all day. Funny, this stuns us not at all! During the meeting, Keller mentioned the crummy economy and industry as a reason for the cuts. He also spent a good deal of time discussing how the Times could beat Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, or, as Keller put it today, "The New York Times Lite." Ouch. "We would be fools to underreact or to overreact," Keller was said to pronounce. "We cannot win by being defensive, we cannot curl up and act that way." Oooh! It's a real-live newspaper war!

In March 2007, Yahoo named Reggie Davis its vice president of marketplace quality. The headlines hailed him as Yahoo's new "click fraud czar." Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics, a search-marketing researcher, told CNET the move signaled "Yahoo is taking a more honest approach" to fighting click fraud." So what does it say about Yahoo's "honest approach" now that a tipster tells us Davis got the pink slip?

By year's end, the New York Times will cut 100 newsroom positions, executive editor Bill Keller announced this morning at his regular "Throw Stuff At Bill" meeting. "At the end of the year, the newsroom will be smaller than it is now," Keller told the group, warning that staffers should prepare for layoffs. "The newsroom leadership will share in the sacrifice," he said, according to an attendee. When the Times announced the elimination of a dozen support positions last fall, Keller said the paper would cut "a few management jobs in administrative areas," a far cry from today's announcement. Despite the planned cuts, Keller said today, the Times will still have 150 more newsroom staffers than any other paper; spokeslady Catherine Mathis tells Jeff Bercovici the newsroom's staff is currently 1,332. "As you know, we have not been reducing our staff. It's been quite the opposite," she told him. "We've been increasing the number of newsroom staff. [But] right now we're in the midst of a very difficult time in the business." Well that's odd. During the December cuts, Keller said something completely different!

It didn't go well when Yahoo India sacked 40 in Bangalore this week. Employees were given just 30 minutes to clean up and go. The Economic Times reports that "emotionally distraught employees broke down on receiving the news." Then, Yahoo India CEO Sharad Sharma forbade top management from "interfacing" with laid-off employees. Too bad there isn't a Chevy's in Bangalore, eh, Ryan? (Photo by Premshree Pillai)

Joy Mountford, vice president in charge of Yahoo's user experience and design group, was among those laid off, we're told. Mountford founded Apple's human-interface group, wrote books, gave lectures, and encouraged designers to race toy babies by licking lollipops. She did everything, in short, except contribute visibly to shipping a product of consequence. The Yahoo of 2008 has no room for trophy executives.

Signing off from Yahoo!. Fade to black... about 3 hours ago
Celebrating unemployment with a giant margarita at Chevy's. 5 minutes ago [Silicon Alley Insider] (Semi-related: soon-to-be-former Defamer editor Mark Lisanti already started his Tumblr!)

And so it begins. Tribune CEO Sam Zell announced in an email today to employees that he'll be cutting 400-500 positions across the company's various newspaper divisions. "Unfortunately, I can't turn this ship from its course of the past 10 years within just a few months," Zell wrote. "Further, while I will do everything in my power to drive, pull and drag this company forward, I can't promise we won't see additional position eliminations in the future." So reassuring! In an email to Los Angeles Times staff, publisher David Hiller said a third of the 150 spots he expects to cut will come from the newsroom. Last week a dozen Tribune HR employees got the Zell ax, and in Florida, the CEO warned Sun-Sentinel employees more cuts were ahead. "If you want to visit the corporate office, you ought to do it in the next month." Both Hiller's and Zell's emails are after the jump.

A tipster tells us Yahoo senior directors George John and Subhhash Bhatia didn't finish the day employed yesterday. John, our tipster writes, wasn't a particularly harmful presence. Bhatia, however, ran his "division completely into the ground, forcing managers and engineers to flee to other parts of Yahoo — anywhere but under him. It's a pity that it took layoffs to let him go." Psst, Subhash. If you have a guess as to who the tipster is, this means you shouldn't ask him for a reference.

While accusing Yahoo News GM Amy Iorio of tiresome nepotism, our last tipster said Iorio's sister, Denise Iorio "has no clearly defined job function and doesn't work on any distinct property." Seems Yahoo caught on. Denise Iorio caught the sharp end of the ax yesterday, a tipster tells us. Friends and neighbors, that means you shouldn't believe her when she says she's on an extended maternity leave.

Ryan Kuder lost his job yesterday. He was senior manager of integrated campaign strategy at Yahoo — right, we have no idea, either. Now he's the guy who Twittered his canning.For the blow-by-blow, see below. There's a happy ending, though: Kuder later sent this tweet: "At the Apple Store. The Air is sexy."

"Well, after a bunch of soul-searching, I'm leaving Yahoo," Salim Ismail writes in his blog. " I took the opportunity to take a decent package." A liar to the last: Out of 1,100 laid-off Yahoos, Ismail was the only one to pretend he walked rather than being walked. No, Salim, you were fired in a mass layoff. Claiming otherwise, while privately badmouthing former boss Bradley Horowitz for canning you, is unseemly. And that promise to "help" with Fire Eagle, the project you kept taking credit for, even while it remained unfinished? The only help you can offer is packing up your things a bit faster.

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's vice president of "social search," was among those laid off today. Yahoo's attempts to harness its vast user base to improve search results has never borne fruit. Since Yahoo has said it's cutting back in areas not deemed critical to its future, is Bonforte's departure a sign that social search no longer matters? Unlikely, since Yahoo recently incorporated Del.icio.us, the Web bookmarking service it bought from Joshua Schachter in 2005, into its search results. And management of Yahoo Answers, another Bonforte responsibility, was moved to Europe. More likely Bonforte, ostensibly Schachter's boss, was deemed inessential to the effort. Yahoo's layer-cake bureaucracy is being sliced away.

Marketing executives Brad Ramsey and Karin Timpone are the latest out the door at Yahoo, a tipster tells us. According to their LinkedIn profiles, Ramsey came from eBay in 2006. Timpone joined Yahoo in 2005. Her most recent title? "Head of consumer/customer innovation." It took Yahoo three years to figure out that's not a real job?

As Yahoo lays off hundreds, possibly thousands, of employees, our commenters are filling us in on the details. Commenter Winston Smith writes that laid-off employees are getting two months' severance, not the usual three months Yahoo has previously offered. (Other commenters disagree, reporting three-month packages.) The unfortunate will also not be getting their 2007 bonus. Commenter supernoob offers this anecdote:

Forty people (twice as many as originally thought)An iVillage spokesperson "can confirm for you that 13 employees were affected today" by layoffs at the NBC subsidiary, not the larger number we reported earlier based on employee accounts. "Nobody saw it coming," an insider told us. Editor-in-chief Jennie Baird, who was hired away from AOL in April to helm the women's content company is among the victims, according to a source. The sneakiest part we're hearing though, is how NBC may have enticed iVillage employees to move to the network's New Jersey location. "These people were good enough to agree to go to hell (aka Englewood Cliffs) and they got canned," we were told. "Many of them were promised bonuses to move...but they had to stay until Dec. 2008. Big bonuses. 20% of their salaries." If we could think of a less-offensive term than "indian-giver" for NBC, we'd use it, but we totally can't!

After two years at Yahoo, Susan Mernit got the ax at Yahoo Personals. Know any other layoff victims? Send them in.