The SaveOurTimes.com letter, with names of nearly 500 Times staffers, was sent to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at 5 p.m. ET today. (The online letter expresses “profound dismay at several recent developments,” including Janet Robinson’s $15 million exit package.) The Guild tells its members:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

In addition to the letter, our website now offers messages from your colleagues to Arthur decrying recent developments. If you’ve already signed, and you want to add your own comments, just sign onto the letter again, including your full name and title, and include your quote. It will be posted immediately. If you wish to see comments posted by your colleagues, go to [this address].

Read the union’s message to its members after the jump. Read More

I really didn’t expect the New York Times to tell me what it did with the employee who sent an email intended for 300 people to over 8 million home-delivery subscribers — and made national headlines because of it — but I thought I’d try.

Was the employee transferred, fired or disciplined in another way because of the error? I asked New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. She responded:

We’re not going to comment on this situation beyond what we said last week. We regret that the message was sent in error by The New York Times.

As a matter of policy, we do not discuss personnel matters.

“I cannot believe that I have a Twitter account,” writes Pueblo Chieftain managing editor Steve Henson. “If we want to communicate with young people, you have to get with it. … Once or twice a day, I tweet, peep, cackle or whatever it’s called a promo of what will be in the following day’s newspaper.”

It gets worse, as the editor shares his practice tweets with readers.

Tim McGuire, a professor and former newspaper editor who is in his 60s, tweets his reaction:

Do not know Mr. Henson but he embarrasses journalists when he writes drivel about Twitter like this.

* I feel like a twit while tweeting

UPDATE: Late Tuesday afternoon I asked Henson if he wanted to comment on reaction to his column. He emailed:

I like doing Twitter and I see the value of it. The point I was trying to make is that I don’t think I have a lot going on personally that people would find interesting …

Here are some reactions posted on my Facebook wall:

Jenny Mondor
It’s like Andy Rooney came back from the grave and slapped together a column about social media! OK, not quite. A much better thing to do would be for him to write a column about how he has a Twitter feed and encourage people to tweet him about how he should use his Twitter feed, or what they want to hear from him. It really can be a pretty effective tool to talk to your readers. Instead, he comes across as a crotchety old jerk that I wouldn’t want to talk to anyway.

Dan Callahan
Well, I think the poor guy is trying to be funny. It is also apparent that writing humor is not one of his strongest skills.

David Kelly
He violates the 11th Commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Make Light of Social Media.’

Chauncey Mabe
Oh, what’s the big deal. Managing editors have been embarrassing themselves with bone-head columns since before the electric typewriter.

Malcolm McDowell Woods
After reading the column, we can only be thankful he didn’t tweet his daily routine. As for promoting the next day’s paper, “Interesting day in court” seems pretty vague. I think it can be used more effectively than that.

Wayne C. Countryman
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Dan Mitchell
As I observe here, Rupert Murdoch has not yet pasted a link into a tweet, and neither has this guy, who says he’s tweeting to promote his newspaper. It’s apparent that these people don’t care enough to figure the thing out before using it or writing about it.

After I posted this photo of a sign at a Fort Worth-area Dollar Tree store, one of my Facebook friends wrote on my wall:

I’m no Circulation Director, but… shouldn’t the S-T be delivering MORE papers there? Buy as many as you want, people!

I asked Star-Telegram circulation operations director Keith Vick about that, and he told me he’s tried to get more papers into the store. The store manager, he says, doesn’t want them.

“We talked to her. We said, ‘What kind of marketing plan is this?’ I’ll take a thousand papers to that store if they need them.”

Vick continues: “She just said, ‘I don’t want to mess with this.’ We’ve talked about pulling out of the store to teach them a lesson,” and force them to deal with customer complaints about not having the paper.

I talked to employees at three other Fort Worth-area Dollar Tree stores and they told me that the 3-papers-per-customer edict came from company headquarters in Chesapeake, VA. (I’ve put a call into their media-relations department.)

One employee told me his store had been selling “20 to 30 papers at a time” per customer because of the coupons.

The manager of the Ridgmar Mall Dollar Tree said:

I get maybe 40 Sunday papers and I have customers here at 9:15 or 9:30, and I don’t open until 10. They’ll get 10 or 15 of them, I’m going to say for the coupons.

She added that customers sometimes leave the news sections behind.

* Earlier: “Overwhelming demand” for Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Hearst Magazines president David Carey tells employees in his New Year’s Letter sent this morning that “our target is to reach more than one million paid digital subscribers per month via iTunes, Zinio, Nook, Amazon and Next Issue Media.” Read more of his 2012 goals after the jump.

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