When it was over and the feature page was gone, dozens of reporters had been fired and the morning assignment editor was shown the door only minutes after handing out the morning's first assignments, The Daily News — or what was left of it — was in a state of shock.

For weeks the staff had known that layoffs might be coming, and when they did come, on Sept. 16, it was with the swiftness of a Soviet-era purge. Newsroom veterans were summoned into an office and told about a digitally driven corporate restructuring.

Those outside the building were told their fates by phone — some while on vacation. One reporter was so left in the dark that when she got to work that day, there was already an intern in her seat.

"It was not the normal thing with a few cuts here and there," said one employee who was fired and who, like many, spoke on the condition of anonymity because his severance package had not yet been delivered. "This was a total repositioning of the product."

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Mortimer B. Zuckerman Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

At the very least the job cuts meant that the recent attrition at newspapers across the country had finally arrived in force in the nation's media capital. But it also suggested something deeper