Postscript

Over the last week or so, I’ve been dealing with a bit of a nightmare. Our upstairs heat pump system got frozen over because of the recent weather issues—and the temp did not tip above freezing for days. So we were stuck away from our house for an extended period, having to check on it periodically to make sure things didn’t get too bad.

But then, after things finally started to thaw, we ran into another problem entirely—the breaker that ran the unit tripped and wouldn’t turn back on, knocking out our other heat pump. Two heat pumps, both completely offline, and we were struggling to find someone who could help. It took us over a day to get back to normal.

It strikes me that, as a guy who writes about obscure things, I don’t know nearly enough about electric breakers—which I’m going to inevitably have to fix with a future issue. But what I will say about my situation is that while it was frustrating, while there was risk, we ultimately got things back to relative normalcy.

My small personal crisis, which has kept me away from writing this week, doesn’t compare to what happens when you dismantle a newspaper. When you lay a few people off, the machine gets harder to manage, and relationships fall by the wayside, but it ultimately still works … if barely.

The Washington Post, not the first newspaper to suffer significant cuts, chose something more dramatic, effectively closing entire sections. Like sports—the week before the Super Bowl, days before the Winter Olympics, and the day of a major trade in which the Washington Wizards acquired Anthony Davis, a veteran (if frequently injured) superstar player. They essentially shuttered the sports section at a national news outlet during one of the busiest periods of the year for sports.

Sports is traditionally a major driver of interest in newspapers—but Post owner Jeff Bezos, based on this action, seems not to care about them. (Recently departed Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis does, based on his appearance at an NFL event this week, but um … not enough to save the section.)

The Post, a local newspaper with national reach, has always somewhat struggled to keep a focus on the local part of its mission given its distance to the halls of power. But it still had a strong team of nearly two dozen reporters on its Metro desk—now it has a lot less, forcing local TV stations and budding digital outlets like The 51st to pick up the slack.

These cuts seem to reflect the actual interests of Bezos, rather than a desire to play steward for a culturally important newspaper. I’m with Parker Molloy on this—this feels like a “curation” of sorts on the part of Bezos, who decided that he didn’t want his plaything to be everything to everyone anymore. It’s an ironic position for the guy who created “The Everything Store.”

The cuts, even by the traditional math of journalism chopping, don’t begin to make sense. Even big cuts at newspapers are somewhat surgical, leaving departments alive even if a shell of their former selves. The Post has chosen to make cuts that essentially make it a larger version of Politico with a lot of legacy baggage, or less charitably, a really big Substack. It’s an embarrassing retreat for the paper that gave us Woodward, Bernstein, and the Pentagon Papers—and a shameful minimization of what is still a local newspaper.

It’s enough to make one wish that Kara Swisher’s quixotic plan to buy the Post from Bezos had actually gotten off the ground.

(claudiodivizia/DepositPhotos.com)

What a journalist going through a major layoff is probably feeling right now

Like many journalists, I can speak to this moment—the pain folks are feeling, the emotions being carried—because I have been through a mass layoff at a newspaper. It happened at the end of 2008, in which my entire paper, a free daily publication run by The Virginian-Pilot, was shut down. It was hugely disruptive and quickly scattered a tight-knit group, which no longer had a daily paper to keep us together.

In that moment, the Post played savior, at least for my own career. A year earlier, an editor had attempted to recruit me to work as a page designer for the Post, but I ultimately withdrew, because I liked my job and didn’t want to leave Hampton Roads. (I also felt my more loosey-goosey style could get lost at a more traditional paper. At the time, the Pilot was known for being visually adventurous.) I didn’t regret the extra year I spent in the area—but now, I needed another job.

Soon after the news emerged, I applied for another job at the Post, this time at its sister paper Express, and got offered an in-person interview right away. It was the closest thing to what I was already doing within shouting distance—so I applied for it.

I was still deeply uneasy with the idea of moving, but eventually I was offered the job—the only one I had applied for, shockingly. I remember at the same time, I was working with a team that was developing a print product, mostly journalists I had befriended an alt-weekly that was shuttered at the same time. My nerves, caused by the lack of stability, were hitting hard, and my friends had asked whether I was okay—they could tell something was up.

Something was, because I had just realized in my head that I was going to be moving, after months of telling myself I didn’t want to move. I called the editor back, and accepted the job. Three weeks later, I was in a new city.

It turned out for the best. I loved D.C., I loved Express, and I met my wife there.

I had the best-case scenario—I found another job right away and was able to use my severance to move—but it was still deeply chaotic and life-changing.

The life disruption, as much as it sucked, also created an opportunity for me. During that period over the 2008 holidays when I didn’t know what my next job would look like, I holed up in a coffee shop with my laptop. My challenge: Build something that I owned and operated, and see it through to the end, no matter where it took me. I had a tendency to start projects and never finish them. I wanted to finish this one.

I worked on a site that I thought would keep the memory of my old paper alive. That became ShortFormBlog, and that proved to be an essential building block to where I am now.

But even that came with chaos. My FrankenMac was on its last legs, and I made the very risky decision to buy a new laptop with my severance money. It worked out. But it was not an easy decision.

The good news is that I get to wear my wrinkles in the work I do now.

It’s not just me, or the folks at the Post. Lots of journalists have a layoff story

Look, I’m not saying that any of this is good or even that there’s silver lining here. Or that my calculus was different from anyone else’s. Despite being talented, I have to assume that luck and timing played in my favor during the layoff I went through.

My story of getting laid off is not unique. It’s so not unique that in early 2009, right around the time of my layoff, news design legend Charles Apple wrote an excellent guide for surviving a layoff. It was packed with advice from numerous people who had a just been laid off.

Layoffs are so embedded in the culture of journalism that you probably know someone who has been through one—or, unfortunately, more. But there’s a next step, and odds are, it might be on the frontier, like ShortFormBlog was for me.

The thing is, there were always a couple papers that felt at least somewhat immune to the winds of the industry, that would always offer safe harbor to talented journalists. That seemed immune from the worst elements of private equity or the ugliness of union-busting CEOs. The Post was one of them.

Now it isn’t anymore—and it’s seemingly because of the whims of a disinterested owner. And that’s the part that scares me more than anything else.