Keep it in perspective

Add comment August 19th, 2008

A Gallup survey says employee-reported layoffs are at a five-year high. That should put yesterday’s bad news about Register Star layoffs in the proper light.

Go to the office; work hard; don’t complain

Add comment August 19th, 2008

That was my wife’s advice as I left home this morning. She had just finished reading the story about the layoffs at the Register Star.

The cuts are painful, but there are still more journalists in the newsroom today than when I started here in 1980.

The newspaper industry is experiencing the kind of economic pain that we’ve been writing about with other industries.

When I first started in this business, computers were almost unheard of. I wrote stories on a manual typewriter. I edited stories using a pencil and eraser. The finished product was sent to a Linotype  operator who keyed in the stories.

I was at my second newspaper before I started working on a computer and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that we started using computers to create pages and put type on them.

In the mid-1990s, the Internet Age was dawning. I remember our short experiment with a bulletin board system, which eventually led to our Web site rrstar.com.

There will always be a need for people to gather and organize the news. How it’s delivered will continue to change. How many people will be needed to gather news and make that delivery will change also.