The joy of euphemism

More men in their 50's bite the dust.

Will any of these "new colleagues" be arriving with H1-B visas, I wonder? That's what's happening in so many industries, but the press hasn't been affected by that yet.

You said a mouthful, Watsy. Whatever happened to valuing older workers for their experience and knowledge? Now they're the first to go, because corporations only look at how much cheaper it is to hire a young single college grad than to retain an experienced professional.

Well, to be fair, I'm sure I'll come to eat these words, but it's not easy to teach old journalism dogs new tricks in the digital era. I say that in full recognition that this probably means 10 years from now, I'm toast.

But, Rod, why the sad face?

It was YOU that was the "new colleagues whose skills will improve our capabilities, particularly in the digital arena" just a few years ago when your paper laid off its older workers.

They'll never get rid of you, Rod, just to hire a generic blogger from Bangalore named "Kip".

Will they?

Del

Man, have I heard a lot of this stuff over the years. I've been lucky enough that so far I've never been the one making that "difficult journey" on the plank (knocking on wood furiously here), but it still makes my skin crawl.

I picked up one of my favorite linguistic items in this line back in the '80s, when the tech firm I worked for was undergoing a pretty drastic change of direction. Of course everybody who currently worked there was proficient in the technology we were moving away from, and I heard a VP remark that it would be necessary to "swap out some skill sets" in engineering, by which he meant "fire the people who know the old stuff and hire some who know the new stuff." In my department we amused ourselves for a while by referring to each other as "skill sets."

God help these 50-plus-year-olds who get turned out. I'm 59, holding my breath and biting my fingernails. I could probably find another job eventually but it would probably mean a 25-50% pay cut, plus a relocation, just when I need to be saving as much as possible.

It was YOU that was the "new colleagues whose skills will improve our capabilities, particularly in the digital arena" just a few years ago when your paper laid off its older workers.

Actually, I was hired before any layoffs took place here, and I was sorry to see all those people laid off. There's no reason to think I won't be in the next round, when they come (and they will come).

But it's not like the economics of the newspaper industry leave publishers much choice. I don't expect to be writing for a newspaper for the rest of my career, though in a perfect world I would do just that -- I love newspapers and newspaper writing. But the world is changing, and the demand for our product and service is collapsing. The publisher of my newspaper called the entire office together in a hotel ballroom a few weeks back and spent an hour and a half laying out to us all the terrible state of the industry, and our paper's place in it. It was extremely depressing, but I appreciate that he did what he did. All of us are living through a real revolution in information technology, though some of us -- workers in Old Media -- are really suffering because of it. I wish people still loved newspapers, and that newspapers were still, by and large, loveable. But they don't, and they aren't, and all the wishing in the world is not going to save our jobs when fewer and fewer people want what we have to sell. You should see the numbers. It's devastating -- and almost all newspapers are going through this, the good, the bad and the mediocre alike.

A few years ago, I would have said something like, "Well, if only newspapers weren't so biased to the left, we'd be doing better." I don't believe that anymore. I think we'd do marginally better, but the fact is, the revolution is technological and cultural, not political. Before my newspapers hit my front porch before the sun comes up, I already know the main stories that are going to be in there, because I either checked them on the web before I went to bed, or I woke up early enough to read the front pages online. How does a traditional newspaper compete with that? The only way it can is to get a lot better with its online delivery system. Hence the need for skills and talents and a way of thinking about news and information that don't come naturally to older workers (and even middle-aged ones, like me).

All due respect, Rod, but I tend to think that what's wrong with the newspaper industry can't be fixed by some hotshot young internet gurus (probably from either India or China). What's wrong with newspapers is depressingly simple: people can't write, and people don't read.

Apart from the editorial pages where the best quality writing can be found, many of the newspapers I've picked up in the recent past are just riddled with the kinds of basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that wouldn't have been accepted in a high school journalism class twenty years ago, let alone made it into the print edition of a major newspaper. Online stories, especially wire releases, are similarly plagued; my husband once shared with me a copy of a famous person's obituary he found online, and the thing was so poorly written we were astonished that it was ever released at all, let alone as an example of a major wire service's reporting on the event.

Of course, none of this matters, as few people read newspapers, watch the news, or pay attention to any online news sources anyway. It can be hard to remember that in the atmosphere of a blog like this one, but ask ten people what they think of something like the recent events involving Bear Stearns, and I'd bet at least six of them would think "Bear Sterns" was a local high school football coach.

So unless the newspaper industry plans to reinvent itself as a new form of infotainment involving quick soundbites and rapid segues from one "hot new story" to the next--in other words, unless print journalism itself plans to become a sort of TV news-on-demand online with 24/7 updating--it's not going to compete for the scattered attention spans of most Americans. But if it does become that, then it's not print journalism any more, is it?

I shouldn't have said "cultural" illiteracy. We have that problem, too, but what I meant is just basic, plain illiteracy - i.e., the inability or unwillingness to read and understand data that is more complex than literary soundbites.

I don't take a newspaper because I find them depressing. It's the same reason I could never be a police officer. Who wants to be exposed to the worst of humanity every day?

My view is halfway between trotsky's and Eric W's/Rjak's: I understand the need for shorter paragraphs, but I still prefer paragraphs. The New York Times is no less easy to read because it features paragraphs with three sentences.

I know that I am not a typical newspaper reader, but as newspapers get dumber and dumber, I find less and less reason to bother with them. It's like we don't want to bore readers by cluttering up their newspaper experience with words. I often feel today, even when I read my own newspaper, that I'm reading the script from a TV newscast. I like complexity and expressiveness in the way I get my news! I wonder if the likelihood that we in the news biz are alienating readers like me is compensated for by the simplicity-favoring readers we don't lose. As someone whose living depends on keeping readership up, I'd rather lose people like me than lose people like them, if it meant my paper still had the means to keep me gainfully employed. But I do wonder if we're going at this the wrong way.

Our local paper has a daily feature which reprints an excerpt from that day's edition of 150, 100, & 50 years ago. The complexity of the writing in the 1858 edition as compared to today's is astonishing. It's not really good, from a literary point of view--it's ridiculously mannered and not necessarily that impressive in substance. But it's complicated enough that a contemporary college student would probably whine if forced to read it, and many contemporary high school grads might not be able to.

Eric,

Yes, disorganized smatterings of facts are one of the problems of news reports.

Rod,

My great fear is to watch the stories on my own newspaper's Web site that garner the most traffic. Clicks are brutally efficient at telling you what people are reading, and complex, nuanced prose rarely makes the top 10. Nope, that doesn't make me happy either.

I do love the suggestion from the recent Atlantic (linked here, IIRC) about following the most e-mailed stories. What did you share with someone?

But pay-per-click advertising is ruthless.