This is the 3rd, maybe the 4th -- I’m losing track -- layoff in the past year at my newspaper. The layoff gods have been good to me, and were again once more. I’m happy to say I still have a job, I remain among the employed, still a working journalist. I’m grateful.

Especially given the newest unemployment stats posted that put the country’s average near the 10% mark, the highest in 30 years.

Scarier still, workers laid off early in the downturn will lose their unemployment benefits come September unless there is another extension.

Though there’s never a good time to be unemployed, now seems particularly harsh. The experts haven’t been especially good at gauging this recession and aside from an upswing by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, today’s business news was the same as yesterday’s: bad.

The industry where I’ve built my career – newspapers – has always been low-paying and competitive. Today, it’s still those things, but it’s shrinking as it expands. What a paradox journalism has become.

As the appetite for information grows, the ranks of journalists have disappeared. The demand for credibility increases, yet the ability to meet that demand becomes impossible; there are just a few people doing work previously done by many.

Survival becomes the goal, the only one really, and cost-saving measures are implemented at every turn, even when no sense can be made of it. Except that it saved a few bucks. Maybe over time, a job.

In the end, because everyone in this field loves what they’re doing, we work long hours, aim for top quality and kick into high gear when the governor comes to town. Even as the product shrinks and expands and mutates into what’s surely just the start of what’s so far proven to be a most unpredictable future, we carry on, the adrenaline still pumps, just not as often as it used to.

I haven’t heard a single happy layoff story. But I do know some people who found jobs in the same fields they were let go from. And some industries will bounce back as the economy improves over time.

Laid off journalists however, have no place to look, now or in the future. Not in traditional media anyway. It’ll still exist, but the business model as we once knew it is gone, and with it, the traditional newsroom.

New media is largely comprised of unpaid writers, with just a small staff of paid editors and maybe a writer or two. Profit margins are slim at many new media sites, and social media has yet to turn the money corner. Everyone has an opinion how this will shake out but it’s still shaking, the balls still in the air.

What’s a hit, a miss, a fad, a must? It’s hard to know yet if Twitter will go the way of MySpace or become a Google-like success, or if some bloggers will tire of the pastime, the novelty of commenters gone.


Not to discount the importance of bloggers; I blog more than write. Bloggers have improved the news landscape in many ways, and kicked open areas for exploration and discussion that might have otherwise remained buried. Bloggers are part of the new journalism, but they don’t define it, and many, I think, are passing through. Blogging is, largely, a hobby for many.

I also wonder, too, if readers will become fussier, get tired of opinions and begin to demand sources. Right now it’s all new, all fun, there’s so much information all the time, everywhere. I know I can’t stop looking, reading in every direction; I think the web gave me ADD. Once in a while, I pull back from the fray and just read one publication. Just because it’s easier. I picked up Newsweek not long ago and I thought how nice it was to have all this info in one place. Glossy, convenient. I read it lying on the couch. Comfy!

But as traditional newspapers and magazines fight for survival, every still-working journalist is fearful of the next layoff. And if not the next layoff, the future overall. Because even if we hang on for another year or two or three, then what? Will there ever be security?

Probably not. But then, I guess if I wanted security I would not have picked this field to begin with. Hopefully I’ll get to stick around to see how it all shakes out. In the mean time, be sure to follow me on Twitter …