And Though The News Was Rather Sad …

There are days when you question what you’re doing with your life, and then there are days when you are holed up in a cheap motel room, all of your worldly possessions stuffed in a car in the parking lot outside, 1000 miles from everyone you know and love, desperately pursuing a job in an industry that is, by all accounts, dead in the water.

This is a roundabout way of saying I started my internship at the San Diego Union-Tribune this week. My first day was depressing. I found out a few days before I started that the paper had just gone through a rather severe round of layoffs. In fact, the man who gave me a tour of the building today had just been laid off after nearly 25 years on the job.

If you can imagine, the atmosphere in the newsroom was not jovial. Two people asked me rather pointedly, “Why journalism?” Looking around, I didn’t have much of an answer.

My tour-guide showed me the rows of empty cubicles, the silent equipment, the former grandeur. “Can you imagine what it was like?” he said. I could.

Because newspaper buildings, even in these dark days, are still something to behold. They’re monoliths — self-contained empires of ink. The Union-Tribune building is five stories tall and has a gym and a cafeteria with rooftop seating. In one of the editorial board rooms there are signed pictures of all of the notable people who have sat down for a Sunday Q&A session. Nixon, Reagan, both of the Bush presidents and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name just a few.

The printing presses, which occupy another section of the building, take up roughly three floors. And the U-T not only writes, designs and prints its newspapers, but it ships them across San Diego County with its own fleet of trucks.

As I looked at all this, I couldn’t help but think of the enormous overhead costs. It didn’t seem surprising at all that the good ol’ days were coming to an end. In fact, it seemed inevitable.

You see, newspapers have always been notoriously slow to innovate, but that’s never been an existential threat until recently. Most papers were still enjoying double-digit profit margins until the recession hit in 2008. Of course, over the ’90s and 2000s, those profit margins steadily slipped, but the journalism industry failed to realize the magnitude, or even the cause, of the problem. Instead of embracing long-term solutions and innovation, the newspaper owners laid off a few more people every quarterly report and hoped the situation would magically right itself.

So papers started shedding their most talented journalists (read: most expensive journalists) to save money, yet they still clung to money-sucking, outdated practices.

For example, I found out that the Union-Tribune was still pasting up its inside pages until November of last year. Let me repeat: until November 2009, the Union-Tribune still manually designed all of its pages, except for section covers.

For those who don’t know, until the advent of desktop publishing, newspapers designed their pages by cutting and gluing articles, headlines and pictures onto thick poster-boards. Those boards went down to the printer, who took a photo negative and made a printing plate out of it.

The design room and all the equipment was still in place — a huge bank of angled, wooden tables, nicked with innumerable razor cuts, where designers slashed and pasted the paper together. My tour guide said the designers — part-time employees for the most part — were even unionized back in the day.

The Union-Tribune was the last major daily in the U.S. to still use paste-up. This is the sort of thing that makes a lot of Internet advocates unsympathetic toward the plight of newspapers. They call newspapers dinosaurs, and not entirely without cause.

Of course, I’d bet most of the new-media geeks who smugly champion the death of newspapers have never seen journalists pack up their desks after 25 years on the job. It’s one of the sadder things you can see. Not many people love their jobs like journalists do. We honestly think we have the coolest gig in the whole world, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine doing anything else.

And that’s the rub. It’s not the loss of the fancy buildings and traditions that really hurts. That’s just nostalgia. It’s the loss of the people. You can’t replace these reporters — not just their experience and institutional memory, but their passion — with crowd-sourcing, a list of links or a multimedia slideshow. Furthermore, a lot of these people aren’t going back into journalism. We’re losing them for good, and the craft is going to suffer as a result.

I’m sorry. I’m digressing. So what does this all mean for me? Yeah, I’m unhappy. Why wouldn’t I be? I not only found my dream job, but I’m kind of good at it, too. And it’s dying a slow, miserable death.

On the other hand, I’m so lucky. The Union-Tribune rarely accepts interns. They throw out stacks of résumés every day. This amazing opportunity dropped right in my lap, and now I get to work with a group of insanely talented journalists for a year. I plan on learning everything I can from them, and I have a lot to learn.

But I’ve also got a few things to teach. The upside to all of these layoffs is that the Union-Tribune is reorganizing its whole structure with an emphasis on Web-first content. The paper’s new owners* are looking to experiment, and there’s going to be a lot of wiggle room to try new things. There’s going to be a lot of opportunities for young, tech-savvy journalists (ahem) to mix things up.

(In fact, as part of its reorganization, the paper hired a bunch of cub reporters at entry-level positions, which is pretty cool.)

Once I get my bearings, I want to do all of the things I never had time to do when I was juggling a reporting job and college classes. I want to have a killer blog and Twitter feed for my beat. I want to use Cover-it-Live for public meetings. I want to get back-and-forth interaction with readers. Basically, I want to combine all the best aspects of traditional journalism with all of the best new media tools.

David Cohn declared not too long ago that “journalism will survive its institutions,” and I dearly hope he is right. I dearly want to prove him right. The chances of getting hired out of an internship seems, at the moment, rather slim. Hell, the chances of getting anything but a minimum-wage job seems rather slim.

My hope then — my dream — is that I can take everything I learn here and maybe make something new and fresh and exciting. It might not have a gym and a cafeteria, but if it can pay a living wage, that’s good enough for me.

* The paper was bought out by a private equity group in 2009, which is what led to the shake-up. Prior to that, it was owned by the Copley family since 1928.