Betty Martin, Writer

One of the great joys of being a job seeker in the digital age is the ability to start my mornings by scanning a half-dozen newspapers, including the pages from my recent home away from home, the Houston Chronicle, from my laptop, sipping coffee, still snug in my pjs.

Friday morning — which will forevermore be known to me as ‘Black Friday’ — I opened the Baltimore Sun’s page to see the news instantly blocked by a request for me to join a new shopping service.  It has apparently been given favorable reviews by Oprah Winfrey, the ad for the service states.  And it offers me the chance to save money on purchases of top-brand sunglasses, handbags and other designer labeled goodies — simply by joining the service with a subsciption to the Sun.

Then I clicked on the New York Times’ business page to find a personal message to me and others noted as “newspaper professionals” by NYT’s computer system. It had systematically filed links to stories the NYT decided I would enjoy reading, based on my profile on Linked In, an entirely — I thought — unrelated gathering place in the ethos. This is what I found that made my page-hopping and job-seeking activities more urgent, though perhaps more futile.

News for Media Professionals From NYTimes.com
Headlines displayed here are customized for you based on your LinkedIn profile.
No personally identifiable information was shared to bring you this service.

(Then it goes to links to ‘opt out’ of this service or to read NYT’s Privacy Policy, then the big and dismal headlines for the newspaper biz):

1) Newsprint Maker Seeks Bankruptcy Protection
2) Gannett’s Quarterly Earnings Fall 60%
3) Media General Posts Wider Loss and Cuts 300 Jobs
4) F.D.A. Rules on Drug Ads Sow Confusion as Applied to Web
5) The News on Paper, and Other Artifacts

That’s  several death-knells or cries for help for the print industry sounded in one morning.

I will likely not become a member of the BT’s shopping service, not having a great deal of money these days to spend on Prada, etc., but I will likely continue to receive the NYT-LinkedIn service sharing media news for interested newpaper professionals.

I’m just one of those people who continues to be fascinated by heroes and cowards,  greatness and greed, nobility and treachery, the range of life witnessed in the last hours of the Titanic, which also sank in April.

About a month ago, after 146 years in business, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put out its last print edition.  At the same time, the publisher, Hearst Corp., also said farewell to about 130 reporters, editors, pressmen and others laid off by the company.

In late March, Hearst Corp. completed a similar staff reduction at the Houston Chronicle, giving on March 24-25 dozens of its nonmanagement staff (including this blogger) a generous severance package, new career training and the opportunity to seek new employment horizons.

In Houston, the laid off quietly walked the center hallways at the Hearst-supplied training program — ironically held at the site of the Houston Chronicle’s former major newspaper rival, the Houston Post building — like a ghost casting of “The Sunshine Boys.”  Since then, we’ve all quietly melted into employment lines, seeking our future employers who, in this economic downturn, will doubtlessly will welcome our collective centuries of valuable experience.  Really Soon Now.

Seattle, however, is another story.

It is, after all, a town where The Needle is still sharp.

A small group of former reporters and shutterbugs banded together April 14 with the Village Voice Media-owned Seattle Weekly and public TV station KCTS to launch a live news web site — seattlepostglobe.org. That’s about a month since the staff got their kiss-off severance packages and new career opportunities.

Before the Seattle layoffs, Hearst Corp. had unsuccessfully sought a buyer for the paper, with no takers.  Now the Seattle PI’s digital product, seattlepi.com, is being produced online by less than two dozen reamining staff members. 

Check out the Seattle former employees’ new nonprofit site at seattlepostglobe.org.