Washington is a city of connections, and Washington Post political writer Thomas B. Edsall has 35 years’ worth of them. He’s covered just about every presidential campaign since 1972. He’s written three books on politics. He has the institutional memory to rival the most seasoned capital insiders.

Edsall, for example, was the reporter at the Post who realized the news value in Trent Lott’s off-the-cuff remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party late in 2002, when Lott opined that the nation would have avoided “all these problems” had Thurmond been elected president in 1948. A Style section reporter had gone to the event, but Edsall knew that Thurmond had run on a segregationist platform and wrote a follow-up story about the remarks, which soon cost Lott his job as Senate majority leader.

But these days in journalism, what’s that institutional knowledge worth to his employer, the venerable Washington Post? Less and less, it seems. When the cost-conscious Post offered Edsall a voluntary buyout package of close to two years’ salary and assorted other benefits, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“It was quite attractive,” Edsall, who is 64 and a 25-year veteran of the Post newsroom, said of the buyout. “And I’m interested in doing writing that has a little wider stretch than what you can do in newspapers these days.”

Edsall will be taking his sources and his well-honed skills as a reporter to work part-time for the New Republic and other publications. When he and the roughly 70 other Post newsroom employees who recently accepted buyouts walk out the door, they’ll continue the brain drain from America’s newspapers.

Post managers have said the buyouts are designed not just to make way for younger, lower-paid staff but to ratchet down the overall size of the newsroom, which was about 800 people. The offer went to full-time editors and reporters who had been at the paper at least 10 years and would be older than 54 by the end of this year. Staffers with 10 or more years’ service would be eligible for a lump sum payment of one year’s salary on a sliding scale up to two year’s salary for 30 or more years of service. Other incentives included adding five years to their age for the purposes of the paper’s pension as well as medical coverage and other benefits.

The buyouts, paid out of the Post’s surplus pension fund, were too good to pass up for many of the paper’s most experienced hands. But Post insiders lament that this round is cutting into the journalistic muscle of the Post, its institutional memory.

An earlier round of Post buyouts in 2003 led 54 people to depart the newsroom, among them Helen Dewar, the longtime Senate reporter, and Dan Morgan, its expert on congressional earmarks. This time, the Post is losing such familiar bylines as science writer Guy Gugliotta, economics writer Paul Blustein and foreign correspondent Daniel Williams. Some of the Post’s political staff, such as national political correspondent Dan Balz, were eligible for the buyout but decided to stay.

David Broder, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning national political columnist, was eligible for the buyout but decided he was too old to start something new. But he believes the Post is still hurting from the departure of veterans from the previous round, citing Dewar in particular. “She read the Senate as well as any senator could,’’ he said.

Newspapers have long gone through such transitions: veteran reporters retiring and young reporters sliding into their place, eventually building their own connections and institutional recall. But 21st century financial pressures have accelerated the process, leading newspapers to nickel-and-dime employee expenses. It’s easy to see why some frustrated reporters are taking the bait and going.

“We are under a constant process of budget cutbacks,’’ Edsall said. It’s hard, he said, to cultivate sources when they offer to meet at pricey but popular restaurants near the White House such as the Bombay Club — but meals there exceed the Post’s stated spending limits of $15 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $35 for dinner.

The Post reported last month that its average daily circulation in the first three months of 2006 was below 700,000 — down from its peak of 832,232 in 1993. And there is a pervasive feeling in newsrooms around the nation that newspapers are operating according to an economic model that can’t survive. Running a quality news operation can be expensive and labor intensive. Readers are migrating to the Web, but newspaper Web sites are not bringing in nearly the amount of money as the more lucrative print side.

In the meantime, newsrooms are gaining a few more empty desks, and the Post’s news hole is feeling a whole lot thinner, if not actually smaller. Rick Weiss, a science writer and the newsroom’s union representative, described “a real sense of loss” as a result of the latest buyouts.

“It’s hard to imagine a Washington Post newsroom without some of these folks in it,’’ he said. “I feel like we have some impossibly large shoes to fill.’’

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.