Great, now they're destroying my past too

My first post-college job was as an editing intern at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Just for a summer. But it was great: I was surrounded by great colleagues, great interns and great sausages. I learned a lot and had a remarkable amount of fun. As you can probably gather, for a variety of reasons I look back on that summer as being pretty freaking awesome.

But times have gotten hard in the newspaper world. The bean counters have fewer beans to play with; publishers think Twitter is the answer to plummeting ad revenue; design gurus think that readers have the general intellect of a toddler.

And so it's more than a little painful to hear, from thousands of miles away, about the departure of my former boss there, an excellent editor and all-around cool person. She took a buyout and is at the moment filling graduate students' heads with good journalism. Hers is one of about 70 exits, both of the voluntary and involuntary type.

So, crap. I know the people still there will work hard and do their best to produce a great paper. But it's always sad to see this kind of thing happen. And it's doubly sad when you consider the poor business decisions that got it to this point.

So for now, I'll just focus on the good memories.