I came to Washington in 1991 as a reporter for a weekly newsletter at Congressional Quarterly. Brian Nutting, then the top editor at the later renamed CQ Monitor, was my boss. Nearly two decades later, I still consider him the best boss and journalistic mentor I’ve had.

That’s why I was thrilled today to see Brian take a bold, and inevitably public, stand for his colleagues.

CQ has a storied tradition as a company that values nonpartisan, insightful journalism over profit. For decades it functioned as a nonprofit arm of privately owned Times Publishing Company out of St. Petersburg, Fla. Everyone who worked there knew CQ was a different breed of journalism organization — and appreciated the CQ brand.

Those days are over. Times Publishing Company sold out this year by selling CQ to the profit-hungry Economist Group, which also owns Roll Call. Today, the new CQ started acting like a company that cares more about money than the most thorough coverage of Washington possible by announcing the layoffs of a whopping 44 people in the newsroom (see a running list).

That’s what prompted Brian to ask pointed questions. Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail he sent to CQ’s leaders and copied to the entire newsroom, courtesy of FishbowlDC:

In July, when the sale of CQ was announced, we were told that both Roll Call and CQ are profitable.

We were told that the Economist and CQ had many shared values.
We were told that “there is a higher purpose to what we do.”
We were told that the people in the company were highly valued.

And now this.

What possible justification can there be for throwing people out of their jobs simply to make MORE money?

I won’t be surprised if Brian, the senior editor of votes in the news department, now becomes a target of the hatchet men at CQ. But good on him for defending both his colleagues and the company’s historical mission.

The news does not bode well for the CQ brand.