Today I went to work bracing myself for the announcement of the next round of layoffs.
We trooped into the 5 p.m. meeting, expecting not so great things.
Ten Tampa Tribune reporters are going to lose their jobs today. Apparently, writing is less important than distilling news into sound bites synched to iPod playlists.
It's a symptom of the way the world is going. Or, at least, the way America is going. It's not good. The dying of newspapers is a sign of a diseased society. People are getting too lazy, too stupid, too indifferent.
The day before yesterday, I worked an A1 centerpiece story on how high school students in Florida don't possess the basic literacy skills to flip burgers, let alone read newspapers. The Hillsborough County School District is trying to do something about that, but I don't have much faith in it, to be honest. The school district's supervisor of secondary language arts thinks "To Kill a Mockingbird" is set in the '50s.
What am I getting at here? The world is going absolutely nuts, and we're so gripped by fear of the unknown that we don't want to reach out and learn what's happening. Our values have gotten so out of whack that we simply curl up inside ourselves, plug ourselves in, and hope it all goes away.
The sad, scary thing is, Americans can make newspapers go away. But we can't make the problems go away. The Internet gives us the illusion that we can, but let me tell you, folks: Just because you don't click on the gas price story, that doesn't mean the problem vanishes. It's not Amazon.com. It's still going to land on your doorstep whether you've ordered it or not. That goes for elections in Zimbabwe, your corrupt city council or Iraq.
But honestly, America is so far into denial about itself that in a way it's not surprising that newspapers are dying. When you're guilty, it's hard to look in the mirror.
