The paper

I was halfway to work one night in a bona fide blizzard, fishtailing along in my old Civic, when they announced on the radio that roads were officially closed. Any non-essential non-emergency personnel crazy enough to be out driving would be ticketed.

So I called my then-boss — an old-school newspaperman named Dave Hale — and asked him if the First Amendment qualified us as essential personnel.

"Sure," Dave said, "you just show 'em your newspaper ID and they'll give you a police escort the rest of the way to the office."

"Really?" I said.

"Hell no," he said. "You'll get a ticket. But they do expect to read about all this tomorrow morning, so get your butt in here. Just be careful — I hear it's snowing out there."

That's how the job works.

My favorite fictional example of this is from the ending of Resident Evil. As Milla walks through the desolate, zombie-ravaged streets of a now-empty city, we see a fluttering copy of The Racoon City Times with the headline, "The Dead Walk!" The screenwriter, director, set designer and audience all seem to assume that even in that apocalyptic nightmare — or in case of alien invasion or the imminent arrival of a killer asteroid — reporters, photographers, editors and truck drivers would all just head to work like they do every other day of the year. Guys like Dave probably would have.

There was no blizzard yesterday and no zombies, asteroids or killer aliens either. But it was not an easy day to get the paper out.

"The News Journal cuts jobs" the headline reads:

The suddenly high-traffic Gannett Blog has been compiling a tally of yesterday's bloodbath. More than 1,000 jobs so far and it may not be over yet.

But somehow that article quoted above got written yesterday and then it got laid out on the page and edited for accuracy, grammar and style. And it was printed, distributed and posted to the Web. That's how the job works.

I watched the other survivors of Bloody Tuesday performing all those tasks last night in a newsroom dotted with newly empty chairs where people who were good at their jobs used to sit. Wherever I looked I saw someone exhibiting one of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief. Actually, strike that — I didn't really see any bargaining or denial. And not much acceptance either. But plenty of depression and a good bit of anger. It struck me that if something like this had happend at the girls' school, they'd have counselors available and some kind of special assembly or something. (The paper did have a staff meeting set for this afternoon. The one advantage to my graveyard shift is that I haven't been to a staff meeting in five years. I appreciate the necessity for such a meeting, but it strikes me as kind of like this — right idea, awkward messenger.)

I appreciate that newspapers as they currently exist will have to adapt and evolve. Unfortunately, I have little confidence that the people and entities that own most of them now are capable of engineering, or even of allowing, newspapers to evolve the way they must. Cutting payroll in order to maintain the highest expectations of profitability is stupendously irrelevant to the real challenges facing newspapers in the 21st century. It's a misguided attempt to address an unrelated problem and it only serves to make the larger problem worse.

The public needs, as Dave Hale said, "to read about all this tomorrow morning." In the 21st century, the public may not be able to wait until tomorrow morning, and they may prefer to read it all in some format other than ink on newsprint, but the general principle still holds. Whether or not they officially count as such during a snowstorm, newspapers are essential and newspaper people are essential personnel.

In an act of executive malpractice yesterday, more than 1,000 essential personnel were laid off. The public, and the republic, is worse off because of it.

Anyway, if you're the praying sort, please remember these folks in your prayers. (Here's a list of those I'll be praying for, by name.) And if you're the letter-writing sort, please consider a letter to the (remaining) editors. And if you're the voting and e-mailing your representative sort, please consider doing that too. If the founders were correct in their estimation of the importance of a free press — enshrining it prominently in Amendment No. 1 — then it might be appropriate for some congressional committee to hold hearings to enquire whether the people and entities currently running this nation's newspapers into the ground are undermining this vital component of our free society.