Maybe own job fear will put reporters on big story

One of the first calls I got after I was canned as editor of Atlanta’s alternative newsweekly came from a fellow I’d laid off three months earlier. “Hey,” he asked, “you want to go down to the unemployment office together?”

So we headed to the state Labor Department’s North Metro Career Center, a converted supermarket in an old North Druid Hills shopping center. Sympathetic, clerks greeted me, efficiently asking all the pertinent questions.

“Name?” “When did you lose your job?” “Employer?” “Social?”

The waiting area looked like cross-section of Atlanta: black, white, Asian and Latino. Workers who’d dressed that morning for blue-collar jobs; others who’d suited up for the office. Most people looked shell-shocked; some seemed to be taking it in stride.

I asked whether the office always was so packed. “It’s been real busy,” the clerk answered. “But today is the busiest we’ve been all year.” That was just before Thanksgiving.

What a great human-interest story. Unfortunately, I no longer had a place to write about it.

It’s not surprising though that the anxious colleagues of out-of-work journalists view newsroom layoffs and our declining industry as a beat worth obsessing over.

Dailies are considering ceasing weekday publication or closing altogether. The massive Tribune Co. (along with my former employer, Creative Loafing) is in bankruptcy protection. And the New York Times just accepted a $250 million cash injection from a Mexican billionaire.

Reporters cover their own industry’s problems differently than they do those of other industries. Stories on the auto industry have focused on management’s poor decisions and union shortsightedness. But coverage of newsroom layoffs is weighted heavily with angst about the grave consequences for our entire society.

With fewer watchdogs, the argument goes, it will be more difficult to look out for the public interest.

Never mind that Web-based journalism could leave citizens better informed than ever, that thousands of voluntary watchdogs might out-muckrake a handful of reporters, that online access might make it easier for people to look for themselves over the shoulders of public officials.

The underlying, and perfectly understandable, concern for reporters is that journalists are losing their jobs. It turns out we’re just like everyone else: We love our profession. And confronted with the possibility that its time is expiring, we strain reflexively to stop the clock of progress from ticking forward.

Like everyone else, we’re vulnerable.

Maybe, there’s a good side to newspapers’ decline. For decades now, blue-collar workers have been dealing with plant closings and the harsh impacts of layoffs on their families and their futures. But until last year, when 3 million people in the private sector lost their jobs, the toll those cuts were taking was virtually an untold story.

White-collar workers used to never feel the effects of job losses so deeply. Even in the last year, the decline for journalists seems to have been more modest than blue-collar job losses. The trade isn’t prevalent enough to be listed as a category. While newsrooms surely have taken deeper cuts, the broader sector of “publishing industries, excluding Internet” dropped by 41,400 jobs, not quite 5 percent.

But the threat of layoffs might be scary enough to get the media finally to take seriously the kinds of questions that have dogged American families for decades.

For example, why does Georgia’s unemployment insurance top off at $330 a week —- one of the lowest rates in the nation? Where’s the safety net for those of us whose lives are turned upside down when companies toss aside loyal employees in a desperate response to new technology or changing markets? Wouldn’t we all be better off if workers whose skills needed upgrading got generous help with training? And, for heaven’s sake, why is my ability to get health care insurance held hostage by my employment status?

I returned to the unemployment office after New Year’s Day. The waiting area looked about three times as crowded as on that record day in November, and you can bet that a lot of people in the long lines were asking those questions.

Maybe, the journalists who might any day find themselves among them finally have their own selfish reasons for demanding some answers.

> Ken Edelstein, the former editor of Creative Loafing, lives in Atlanta.