AdWeek broke the story; Politico follows up:

“We did a small reduction in our fulltime staff and in our contractors, and we are, like everybody in the business, constantly looking at the competitive landscape and trying to be as responsive and agile as we can,” David Plotz, Slate’s editor, told POLITICO.

The others: associate editor Juliet Lapidos, foreign editor June Thomas and Timothy Noah, the “Chatterbox” columnist on leave for a book about income inequality. Noah will continue to contribute as a non-staff writer.

Thomas, Noah and Shafer had all been there for more than a decade; Shafer since the Michael Kinsley launch of the then Microsoft-owned first-of-its-kind online publication in 1996.

Slate was purchased by the WaPo in December 2004. Second-quarter earnings for the company’s online publishing was down 13% in the second quarter, compared to the same quarter last year. Plotz said the cuts were unrelated to earnings.

American Journalism Review sings his praises in a piece released just before the layoff announcement:

“Here is what Jack Shafer is,” says Erik Wemple, who blogs about the media for washingtonpost.com. “Obviously, very talented, tremendously original and highly informed. But more important, he is utterly uncorrupted by friendship, money, power, anything. He is ruthless with people he doesn’t know, but what is impressive is how ruthless he can be with the people he knows. He’s impervious to outside influence, and it’s a glorious thing to watch.” Although he has been writing about media in one form or another for more than 25 years, Shafer’s passion and fearlessness make him a favorite of a younger audience with expectations of the chainsaw opinion writing of bloggers, says Hamilton Nolan, who handles media criticism in his role as editor of Gawker.

Nolan sees Shafer as perhaps the sole media critic in the country who is consistently unafraid to print what others only think. “Shafer writes much younger, like someone who doesn’t have as much of a career stake,” Nolan says. “It’s rarer to maintain that edge as you climb the ladder. He shoots from the hip, but it’s not a mechanism, because you know when you read his column that he’s a guy who has all this deep knowledge of journalism.”

Perhaps now he’ll get a gig at a print publication. I thought it humorous last week when Shafer pointed to a small study (45 people) that “confirms my print-superiority bias.” See Print vs. Online: How the print edition of the New York Times trumps the online version.