Separately, at the MediaNews Group-owned Denver Post, nineteen newsroom employees volunteered to take a buyout offer to leave the paper.

The Economist has an interest in shaping itself as a kind of imagined community, a social space where fellow-thinkers are implied if not actually seen … The “lean-back, immersive, ritual pleasure” [CEO Andrew] Rashbass believes consumers take from the tablet experience is predicated on an old-fashioned notion of brand identity. It requires that consumers know enough, and care enough, about The Economist to download the app and subscribe to its content in the first place. It requires that they be, on some level, “Economist people.”

GigaOM‘s Mathew Ingram says that while some readers will resist the change, the Times is taking a step in the right direction:

This kind of tiered system takes the same approach to community that massively multi-player online games such as World of Warcraft do: in other words, it creates incentives for good behavior by allowing users to “level up” — that is, improve their online character, add features, etc. — and that investment by users creates a stronger bond between them and the community.