It's not as if staffers at the city's two daily newspapers needed further proof that their corporate overlords saw them as nothing but numbers. Journalistic growth over at 400 N. Broad St. has been sacrificed at the altar of profit margins for the past several job-buyout-laden years. Still, on Tuesday morning, they got all the evidence they needed.

Buried several pages into a Philadelphia Newspaper Inc. internal memo was a list of 535 employees eligible for the latest round of buyouts that Knight Ridder intends to result in the elimination of 75 newsroom jobs at the Inquirer and 25 at the already threadbare Daily News. The positions are listed solely by title (rewriteman, art critic, Jersey high schools writer and among others, fittingly, obituary writer) and age (from 86 on down to 23). As that "Voluntary Separation/Retirement Program" memo circulated the newsrooms, DN editor Michael Days summed up the mood at the White Tower in an e-mail to his staff.

"It's a lousy day," he wrote.

It got even lousier with the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia's announcement that PNI Publisher Joe Natoli "acknowledged that if there are not enough buyouts, there will be layoffs." Union President Henry J. Holcomb likened the announcement to "the devastation of our newspapers."

Staffers who take the latest buyout offer will receive two weeks' pay for every year of service (up to 52 weeks), unused vacation time and a choice of several health-insurance programs, the best of which has KR covering them for two years. Should they accept this mission, which tops other recent buyout offers, their last day of work will be Nov. 18.

Blaming the move, in part, on the fact that the company lost a big advertising contract with Strawbridge's, Natoli sent an e-mail to both staffs stating, "I wish our business faced fewer competitive pressures, as it did when I first joined Knight Ridder nearly 30 years ago, but that's not the world we are living in today." Ironically, one competitive pressure was alleviated a week earlier when SEPTA ended its distribution contract with the Metro. (That paper's future was unclear on Tuesday.)

Natoli also stated that although the company has tried to reduce costs in the past — it reduced management, trimmed the technology department, raised Inky home-delivery rates and added "sales pressure" — its moves "have not nearly been enough to offset revenue shortfalls."

Enter the buyout list. Having just found his coded entry on the page, Daily News columnist and 33-year company vet Stu Bykofsky said, "A year's pay to go away? I'm thinking I'll stick around here and be a pain in their ass as long as I can. You want me out, you're going to have to come back with seven figures."

Byko's gossip protege Dan Gross was none too pleased either.

"This has reinforced my belief that Knight Ridder sees its reporters, photographers, copy editors, etc., as merely the drones who fill the space between ads," he says. "It sucks that we're thought of as costs rather than assets."

Holcomb, who sounded exhausted by 2:30 p.m., says the parent company has to answer to more people than just its employees.

"Frankly," says Holcomb, who notes that a faulty computerized advertising system has already cost the company millions, "the Knight Ridder board of directors owes the Philadelphia region and the employees of its newspapers here a profound apology. … We are now in a horribly weakened position to deal with the challenges in our marketplace."

So what's next? Staffers have until Nov. 4 to apply for the buyouts and, if they accept, another two weeks to clear out their desks. The editors of each paper, however, say they'll push forward despite the obvious strains accompanying personnel losses.

"You can't just pull 75 people out without re-examining the paper as a whole, and we'll devote ourselves to restructuring the paper," Inky chief Amanda Bennett said. "It'll be a very inclusive process, but we need to do this right away."

Downstairs at the Daily News, staffers were already hypothesizing that the paper would strip away many features — what with features editor Theresa Johnson announcing she'd be leaving a position that'll go unfilled. The paper's new focus, their thinking goes, will be nothing but crime, local politics and sports.

"With a smaller staff, we will have to refocus our priorities and restructure our operations. That process is already underway," Days wrote. "All of us have pledged our careers to giving birth each day to this exceptional tab … so anything that gets in the way of that is just plain awful. Having said that, none of this should be misconstrued as a death knell. The Daily News is not closing."

One can only hope.