Reading in an Age of Depression (Page 2)

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

How Not to Read a Newspaper

For a little perspective, just consider the jobs headlines of the last couple of weeks: In a major reorganization, announced on December 8, Dow Chemical revealed plans to cut 5,000 jobs and close twenty plants, sending about 11 percent of the chemical giant's workforce down the human drain. The company also plans to "temporarily idle 180 plants and prune 6,000 contractors from its payroll."

Or think of GM announcing that it will idle all its North American assembly plants during some part of the first quarter of 2009, while turning out 60 percent fewer vehicles. Or the 3M company, which announced cuts of 1,800 on the same day Dow issued its bad news. Talk about a "black" day! Or the Sony Company at about the same time, announcing that it would "cut 8,000 employees worldwide over the next year, slash investment in its electronics business by 30 percent, and close roughly half a dozen of its fifty-seven manufacturing sites around the globe." We're talking 5 percent of Sony's workforce. Or Bank of America, which made public a massive "workforce reduction" scheme: 30,000-35,000 jobs eliminated globally over the next three years, as part of a reorganization after absorbing Merrill Lynch. I mean, we're talking slaughter here. And given the staggering US job-loss count in November, 533,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the fact that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits jumped to a twenty-six-year high in early December, you know that this is just scratching the surface of the disaster.

Chemicals, cars, finances, even Post-its. That's major stuff. Books? They're such modest (and, at best, modestly profitable) objects, even if the book has the remarkable ability to teleport readers into worlds not their own. I mean, if you really want to talk about the destruction of companies in the reading game, then try a business where it's been hell on earth for years: newspapers.

Talk about collapsing worlds, newspapers were a disaster area long before the greatest downturn "since the Great Depression" hit. The bad news about the news has been flooding in for years, even if it has worsened under the weight of more general economic tough times. If, for instance, you were even reading a newspaper in print on Tuesday, December 9 (and, if you're less than 25 years old, odds are you weren't), then you undoubtedly caught the story about the debt-ridden Tribune Company, a news monster that owns, among other properties, the Los Angeles Times (almost half its staff lost since 2001), the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune (almost a third of its staff lost since 2005), and even the Chicago Cubs, filing for "bankruptcy."

The company even had the nerve to claim that bankruptcy meant it could "cease all severance payments and deferred compensation to employees who have been laid off." (Pity the poor reporters who took those buyouts.) It also hired the investment bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin as consultants. In case you're worried, they surely will get paid. (Up front, if they're smart.)

All this means is that another bunch of newspaper workers--a dwindling crew--is now in essentially the same situation as the workers who sat in and won their severance pay at Chicago's Republic Windows and Doors factory after they were given only three days notice to vacate. Don't expect sit-ins or fight-back victories at the LA Times anytime soon, however.

Only the week before the Tribune filed, America's largest newspaper company, Gannett, announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce due to "declining revenue," on top of a 3 percent cut last August (neither evidently being part of the 5 percent "trim" at its flagship paper, USA Today, in late November). And don't get me started on the rest of America's newspapers. At least thirty of them are for sale right now, including the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which lost $11 million in the first nine months of this year, with few buyers in sight.

In the style of some black hole, the vortex of the Internet has, for years, been sucking in young readers and, more important for the finances of journalism, ads, which account for four-fifths of all newspaper revenue (with disappearing classifieds accounting for half of that). Under the extra pressure of hard times, the decline in ad revenues is now turning into a deluge. In the third quarter of 2008, national newspaper advertising reportedly dropped by 18 percent. When it comes to the news in print, you wonder who will be left minding the store. Poor Detroit's main papers are cutting home delivery to three days a week, another national first, and it can't be long before a major US city lacks its own daily. Maybe the question now is: What store?

All of this certainly adds up to a nightmare for a guy just young enough to be running a political website, but old enough to have the habit of reading two newspapers in print a day. Still, none of this got to me, not even those 533,000 lost jobs, the way the firing of one editor I knew did.

And that, I suspect, is typical. For most of us, most of the time, the world is a remarkably parochial place. I read newspapers, use Post-its and Saran Wrap, and drive a car (sometimes). But I've probably edited and put into circulation several hundred books. That's my world. And now it's beginning to look like the time of the Bloated Publishing Conglomerate is nearing an end, with an unknown effect on the Time of the Book itself.

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