In a recent e-mail chat about the future of their business, several young New York Times reporters concluded with dismay that most of their friends don't subscribe to the newspaper.
At the San Jose Mercury News, hardened news hawks facing staff reductions have begun eyeing public relations jobs they once would have disdained.
In Philadelphia, a news photographer who has "loved every minute" of his 68 years in the business doesn't like the trends he sees. He counsels young arrivals: "If you're smart, you'll switch to TV."
Newspaper people across the country have descended into a collective funk over a run of bad news in recent weeks -- culminating with announcements of newsroom job cuts in San Francisco, San Jose, New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
The total retrenchment at half a dozen papers will amount to only about 300 editorial jobs, a paltry hit in an industry with $59 billion in revenue that employs some 54,000 editors, reporters, photographers and others.
But the buyouts and layoffs have dispirited many newspeople because they come at a time of steady declines in circulation and advertising.
The falling morale sometimes is cast in vivid terms, as when Philadelphia Inquirer metropolitan columnist Tom Ferrick Jr. protested the 75 job cuts ordered by Knight-Ridder Inc., his paper's corporate parent.
"They say Knight-Ridder doesn't have a plan. Actually they do, " Ferrick said in an interview. "They are going to jettison the old, shoot the young and ... torture the survivors, which, come to think of it, seems to be an industrywide plan."
Knight-Ridder -- the second-largest newspaper chain by circulation, with 31 dailies and a total circulation of 3.8 million -- recently said its third-quarter profit would decline by 20%. The onetime Wall Street darling saw its stock reach a two-year low. It closed Friday at $56.60, down 23 cents.
Polk Laffoon, vice president for corporate relations at Knight-Ridder, said journalists hear such numbers but sometimes still fail to understand the urgency of the pressures confronting publishing executives.
"Some people accept that the profit this year will always remain at that level. It will not," Laffoon said from the company's San Jose headquarters. "That can turn and suddenly you're barely breaking even
