State of Change

Axed

By Tom Engelhardt

Back in December, I wrote about the layoffs -- what a polite word for a terrible act -- then coursing through book publishing, my own business of more than 30 years. "When you get the word," I commented, "the call, the notice that you're a goner, or when your little world shudders, that's something else again. Even if the call's not for you, but for a friend, an acquaintance, someone close enough so you can feel the ripples, that can do the trick."

I had, by then, felt those ripples when Colin Robinson, an editor I admire, a Brit working for a large New York house, was axed. At the time, I wrote about his firing without using his name, but he's since written his own account of how he was tossed out (and what's happening to publishing) in the London Review of Books. "I'd hardly settled behind my desk," he begins, "when one of my bosses asked if I would join her in the corner office. 'Please close the door,' she said as I entered the room. Seldom a good sign. 'Why don't you take the comfortable chair?' Oh dear.")

Oh dear, indeed. He was gone the next day -- and what was his boss's last comment to him about book publishing? "She said that two words sprung to mind: General Motors." Indeed again. In fact, too much of American life has a GM look to it these days. Take journalism. Newspapers? Get your money out while you can. Last week, the Rocky Mountain News, almost a century and a half old, died ignominiously, as in the near future may the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle and other endangered species of papers. Last week as well, the Philadelphia Inquirer went into bankruptcy, just one of 33 U.S. daily newspapers whose parent companies have recently filed for it; and that's without even mentioning the rest of our papers radically cutting costs and staffs, hocking assets, or sinking into debt. If you needed one more hint about the way the wind was blowing, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported that, "on Friday, the American Society of Newspaper Editors canceled its convention, saying too many members planned to stay home."

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March 5, 2009