Found via a link in the comments of Ron Rosenbaum’s rather vicious attack on Jeff Jarvis, Alan D. Mutter, a Silicon Valley CEO and newspaper consultant has a don’t-miss-it graph of how severely newspaper advertising revenues have declined since 2006. How severely? Here’s the chart in video form:

But Mutter spots the one upside: “Buyout Sex, the other severance benefit“:

Mary F. Pols, a movie critic who accepted one of the scores of buyouts at the Contra Costa Times, made the best of a traumatic situation by having an affair with a fellow scribe at the California paper, she revealed in Modern Love, the most consistently delectable feature in the Sunday New York Times.

“Buyout Sex,” as Mary (left) dubbed it, affords a journalist the rare opportunity to get up close and personal with a colleague without having to worry about “postcoital workplace awkwardness.”

In Mary’s case, the affair began with drinks with a guy from the office who also was thinking about forfeiting his position in exchange for an enriched severance benefit. After an initial, vodka-propelled rumble in the cramped back seat of the colleague’s car, Mr. Buyout Sex and Mary embarked on a months-long relationship.

“In the following weeks, we continued to meet for long nights of sex and conversation, both of which were more naked than I would have expected,” wrote Mary. “After years of knowing each other, we were finally getting to know each other. He didn’t take the buyout after all, so he could fill me in what was going on at the paper, and the connection felt warm and cozy, especially as I confronted my own undefined future.”

Of course, donning fetishwear while engaged in newspaper buyout sex is purely optional. And sheep shagging? Don’t even think about it…unless you follow the apparently carefully researched advice found within the Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book.”

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard adds, “They confused reporting the news with editorializing on the news. These are two, very different, things. People can tell the difference, despite the media’s blindness to this. I think it is coming home for them now.”