Hello, I am a dinosaur
I was talking today to a good friend of mine who still works at the paper where I spent 12 mostly fruitful, sometimes frustrating, years. The newspaper, as I knew it, stops publication on Friday. It is being cut to three days a week and combined with two nearby sister papers.
Many of the people I worked with there are being cut. They haven't been offered a job in this new publication future. My closest friends there are lucky. They were both offered jobs, though at about a 35 percent wage cut. (Two other reporters I knew of were offered jobs, but at wage cuts in excess of 50 percent.) My friend said that the atmosphere there is like a cross between a funeral home and the last day of school before summer vacation. Everyone is in mourning, and no work is being done. I can't imagine what that's like, nor can I imagine what it'll be like for her, going back to a half-empty office on Monday, or what it'll be like when they close that building for good.
Beyond that ... there's so much I can't even imagine being gone. Newspapers are a weird little world unto themselves. Walking in the back door and hearing the massive printing presses just starting up, or running at top speed. The pressmen with hands permanently stained by ink. The smell of ink and tons of newsprint. The loading dock filled with trucks ready to carry the issues out to stores and carries. The sound of the dumbwaiter when the first issues off the press came up to the newsroom. The smell and feel of the paper with fresh ink on my fingers. When I started in this business, I began with a manual typewriter, back in the days when cut and paste was literally cut and paste.
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Many of the people I worked with there are being cut. They haven't been offered a job in this new publication future. My closest friends there are lucky. They were both offered jobs, though at about a 35 percent wage cut. (Two other reporters I knew of were offered jobs, but at wage cuts in excess of 50 percent.) My friend said that the atmosphere there is like a cross between a funeral home and the last day of school before summer vacation. Everyone is in mourning, and no work is being done. I can't imagine what that's like, nor can I imagine what it'll be like for her, going back to a half-empty office on Monday, or what it'll be like when they close that building for good.
Beyond that ... there's so much I can't even imagine being gone. Newspapers are a weird little world unto themselves. Walking in the back door and hearing the massive printing presses just starting up, or running at top speed. The pressmen with hands permanently stained by ink. The smell of ink and tons of newsprint. The loading dock filled with trucks ready to carry the issues out to stores and carries. The sound of the dumbwaiter when the first issues off the press came up to the newsroom. The smell and feel of the paper with fresh ink on my fingers. When I started in this business, I began with a manual typewriter, back in the days when cut and paste was literally cut and paste.
( Read more... )