Culture wars and terrorist paranoia requires way fewer staff, it turns out

Funny how some of SC's conservative bloggers have been crowing for ages about the decline of newspapers as though it would only happen to "liberal" papers.

Now the Moonie DC paper, The Washington Times, is laying of 40% of its staff- for starters- dumping local and sports coverage, and going to largely free distribution.

Among the paper's internal struggles have been controversies about conservative correctness:

Under its previous editors, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Wesley Pruden, the Times pursued a right-leaning path, with Pruden writing a conservative column while running the paper from 1992 until last year. When John Solomon, a former Washington Post reporter, took over the newsroom this year, he focused heavily on fairness, banning such practices as putting "gay marriage" in quotes and shifting to the word gay instead of homosexual...

...Asked about plans to focus cultural coverage on traditional values, Slevin said that meant "freedom, faith and family," with religion being particularly important "to our faith-based readership."