The Onion weighs in

This is awesome, the Onion decided to do a "man-on-the-street" interview story about the Gannett furloughs. 

The best response comes from Rex Kelley, who says: "Great. Let's just tell all the world leaders, terrorists, scientists, executives, artists, athletes, celebrities and people of local interest to take the week off too, so we don't have to worry about missing any news. Although, that would kind of be a news story in itself. This is turning into quite a pickle."

Pity Party

As if the fact that it's -20 degrees outside isn't depressing enough, I also found out yesterday that I'll be forced to take a week off without pay sometime before the end of March. It's part of the company's efforts (so they say, anyway) to avoid layoffs, which they just did in December.

This means that a fair number of my co-workers are in panic mode, scrambling to think of different careers to get into because everyone is convinced that newspapers are dying. Someone asked me yesterday, "So what are you going to do now?" My response: "I guess I'm going down with the Titanic."

Honestly, I can't think of any other jobs or careers I'd like to do. I've kicked around the idea of teaching, but I'm not positive that I would like that – I'm not really that fond of children, especially teenagers.  So I don't want to invest a lot of my time and money into something I'm not 100 percent excited about.  

Where does this leave me? Stuck in a piss-poor economy with absolutely no job security and pretty much no skills that would be transferable to a different line of work.

My only hope is this: Even if newspapers go under, there will still be a need for news and journalists, just in a different environment. So if I hang on and go down with the ship, maybe some Internet company that rises up to fill newspapers' void will throw me a life preserver. 

And if not, there's always Younkers. Hello, minimum wage.