Reflections on Newsroom Layoffs

It's Thursday morning and I'm sitting in a motel room near Elyria, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. My wife, Kathy, and our 19-year-old daughter Ashley are sound asleep in separate beds. Kathy and I are taking Ashley to Wisconsin, where she will live for a few months while working a co-op position with an outfit called Kohler Co., which is best known for making bathroom fixtures. I'm sure many of you have seen the name "Kohler" on, ahem, some of the toilets you've used, correct?

This means Ashley will be taking a break for a semester from her material science engineering studies at Rutgers University, where she is a sophomore. No doubt we're all excited by this opportunity, and I'll provide more on this journey in a future post.

But for now, my thoughts are with folks at The Philadelphia Inquirer -- a newspaper for which I once wanted to work but never could crack -- which this week began laying off reporters, editors and other editorial employees. As of Wednesday, 68 newsroom staffers were told they were being let go, including the paper's basketball writer, who, according to the paper's blog, was told of his fate while covering the Philadelphia 76ers in Denver.

I feel their pain. This blogger was one of the heads served up on a platter in a newsroom purge more than 10 years ago. I had been a staff writer for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., when I was among nine laid off in 1996. My reaction? Mostly relief. To be honest, the newsroom bosses weren't happy with my performance, and my enthusiasm for journalism in general and the Daily Press in particular were pretty low at that time.

My layoff came on the heels of Kathy's employer, the Hampton School District, refusing to renew her contract after one year as an itinerant high school Spanish teacher. So we found ourselves simultaneously unemployed after moving from the Philly area to Virginia 10 months earlier.

But guess what? Things were difficult, but we got through it with faith in God and help from relatives. We tried to stick it out in Virginia, but finding new employment was hard. So we moved to New Jersey a year later, in 1997, and slowly got back on our feet, buying a house by 2001.

All I can do is advise those who lost their jobs to stay optimistic. (Yes, I know these are those cynical-by-nature journalists, but they are first and foremost, human). Things may look bleak right now, but your situations will improve. I know. I've been there.