Life sucks sometimes

I was once a real manager, office and everything. I once had to lay people off. I'd known each of the people since I was a kid. It was the worst thing I've had to do in my career.

Today the guy who replaced me had to do the same thing. He had to let an old friend go. He also had to lay off someone he hired, someone who was really good at her job. The layoff had nothing to do with the quality of his management or the relative health of the business he works for, in this case a small daily newspaper.

Daily newspapers are a mess right now. Part of it is the economy, part of it the changing tastes in media consumption. A unacknowledged part of it is corporate greed. Most of these businesses do make money, pretty good money in many cases. But not enough for the corporations that own them. You wouldn't know that these papers are profitable from the way this story gets covered. Nor would you know it from what these papers actually look like. There are not very many people employed to put them out. Hence, there is not a lot of stuff in them anymore.

It makes me sick to watch and read. My hometown deserves better. My family used to own the paper. Since we sold it a decade ago has been disappearing like Monty Python's Black Knight, one chunk at a time.

What I would do for a bailout of my own, a big lottery win, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.