The Seattle Times reports that JP Morgan will lay off as many as 3,000 WaMu employees in the Seattle area, cutting the local WaMu workforce to just under a third of its former glory. Layoffs begin this week, and by December 1--in the thick of the holiday shopping season--all of the decisions will have been made about who stays and who goes. This doesn't come as a surprise, but the numbers are breathtaking and the......

TechFlash reports that the list of downsizing Seattle start-ups--Avelle, Intrepid Learning, AdReady, PayScale, and Redfin--has a new member. Jobster, which underwent some widely blogged about shrinkage last year, is saying goodbye to another 15 staff. With terrific understatement, John Cook notes that Jobster "has tested a number of different business concepts since it was founded in 2004," and says that it now is all about "online recruiting software that helps companies manage job prospects." If......

We'd heard that the media's other, cash-poor shoe would be dropping after the election, when all the campaign money dried up. But the Seattle Times is going shoeless a day early, with the announcement of a "workforce reduction of approximately 130-150 positions, a combination of voluntary separations and layoffs." Back in April, the Times shed 200 employees, and said then that further cuts might be necessary. What with classifieds, real estate, and financial services advertising......

The Seattle Times reports that a whopping 400 county government jobs will be cut in King County Executive Ron Sims' 2009 budget. The cuts are part of Sim's plan to reduce county expenditures by $93 million for the next year, a significant belt-tightening. Sims did say that he's trying to delay budget cuts in health and human services, but still....400 jobs gone translates to a lot of men and women who will be looking for......

Jones Soda, local maker of odd-flavored sodas sweetened with actual sugar is still going through tough times. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, Jones Soda is laying off 42 of its 110 employees thanks to a second quarter loss of $2.7 million. Apparently, an effort to expand into can sales didn't fly, so 38 percent of the staff has to go. Most of those losing their jobs are in the sales department. Jones will......

Despite layoffs at seemingly every other major news outlet, CNN is adding 10 new regional reporters in the next year—including one based in Seattle. CNN is calling their new additions "all-platform journalists" (which sounds creepily sci-fi to us) and they will contribute to both on-air and online content. We can expect our very own Seattle CNN correspondent within the year. The other cities also being added to the CNN rotation? Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas,......

It looks more and more like the Starbucks we grew up with has irretrievably lost its way. Every day brings news of layoffs and losses, maps of store closures, tanking stock price, deckchair shuffling in the executive suite, and the frantic introduction of new products (banana smoothies, indeed). digg_url = 'http://digg.com/food_drink/Is_Starbucks_In_Its_Death_Spiral'; In the beginning, down at Pike Place, a regular customer would know every company employee by name. Now there are over 150,000 people on......

All is not well in the land of the mermaid. After weeks of whispered words like "bloodbath" around Starbucks headquarters and gossip sites, the coffee giant announced today just how large this round of lay-offs will be. Today's cuts will affect 1,000 employees, 180 of them located in Seattle at Starbucks HQ or the regional office. This comes hot on the heels of news that Starbucks will be closing 616 under-performing stores and that the......

Things are not well in the land of the mermaid and her coffee empire. Starbucks announced a huge round of layoffs and store closures this afternoon. The coffee giant will be closing 600 stores nationwide and laying off 12,000 of its store employees. The 12,000 layoffs equal about 7% of Starbucks global work force. The layoffs and closures will occur between now and March 2009. No word yet if any local stores will be......

Seth over Sports NW just tipped us off to the bad news regarding the Tacoma News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, which won't be updated until training camp. Ironically, the blog's tagline reads: "Where there is no off season." *cough* Frank Hughes explains the situation in a post:As you may have heard last week, the chain that owns the paper, McClatchy, announced that it is laying off 10 percent of its work force, which in our......

According to Slog, the Seattle Times is about to lay off 200 employees (at least 45 of them from the newsroom). As a friend noted, it's not entirely surprising. Print media far and wide are bowing to the evolution of demand for media. This Seattlest, for one, only ever touches a newspaper anymore if it's in a bin at our local coffeeshop. And, even then, it's to pull out the crossword. We get all......

It's always good to be reminded that here in the other Washington, our Republicans are just as nutty, corrupt and paranoid as their cousins in D.C. Today, David Postman over at the Times reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia. Known as the Convergence Northwest conference, Zarelli invited "[m]embers of Israel’s Knesset, former......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

--Bus wraps are dead! No longer will we have to stare out at a dim world through other people's smiling faces. We can handle the fare increase if that's what it takes. --Seattle startup Exbiblio is blogging their own layoffs restructuring retrenchment. Now that's an open blogging policy. --Best "Hello, My Name Is" sticker ever. --Best umbrella ever. Seriously, we're getting Make Magazine after these guys. --Your giant dog, your tiny condo, and you.......

Last week's rejection of the monorail reminds us of an earlier failure by Seattle to produce cool futuristic transport -- no, not the Jetfoil. We're talkin' SST. On September 29, 1966, Boeing unveiled a full-scale mockup of its supersonic airliner, capable of blasting 274 passengers around the globe at 1,800 mph. Boeing first studied commercial SST use in 1952, and officially began its SST program in 1958. By1963, to compete with the British-French consortium......