Lights Go Out at Gannett Newsrooms Across America

(MoneyWatch)  For the past 24 hours, I've been monitoring the large crowd-sourcing experiment being conducted by current and former Gannett employees about the massive round of layoffs that are being implemented right now by the nation's largest newspaper chain.

Beyond the irony that this sort of collaborative reporting, if earlier sanctioned by the management, might have once helped transform Gannett into a 21st century media company, there is also the rather gruesome aspect of watching skilled reporters and editors in effect writing their own professional obituaries -- at least in the sense of the end of their profession as they've known it.

At the Gannett Blog, which was created to monitor these types of developments, there is the "Roll Call III: Say Goobye to More of Your Friends," which when I started writing this post, reported 1,021 layoffs at 27 papers. But dozens of newspapers were as yet unaccounted for. (I'll update these figures at the bottom of this post when I'm done writing.)

Since late October, Gannett employees have known the axe would be falling right about now, and that around ten percent of the workforce would be losing their jobs before the Christmas season gets underway. That means the ultimate total should come to some 3,000 positions -- one of the largest media bloodbaths in history.

It is typical of journalists to want to cover one last story, even if it is about their own demise. This collective effort serves that purpose. It also represents the best in enterprise reporting. Since corporate management is not choosing to say much publicly about what is going on, the chickens are taking over th chicken coop, as it were.

So far, one of the hardest hit sites appears to be Battle Creek, Michigan, where 50 out of a staff of 105 at the Enquirer have been let go. It's common inside large newspaper chains for young journalists to get sent to posts like Battle Creek, which may be remote from where they grew up or went to college.

Unless they've sunk deep local roots, these newly unemployed younger journalists will now be on the move, searching for work. Those left behind, and unemployed, will have to form the core of whatever new local news hub can be patched together, assuming any such effort gets off the ground there.

Otherwise, such communities will simply cease getting much local coverage at all, as is the case in much of the underdeveloped world. Having lived in a number of Third World communities, I can attest to what kind of information system thrives in this vacuum: Gossip, rumor, superstition, ignorance, prejudice, suspicion, and a monopoly over the most action able information by those in positions of power.

All of that, of course, was the case before the arrival of the Internet. Now, the Battle Creeks of the world can look toward towns in India, China, and Brazil for examples of how they might organize their own news gathering and dissemination services online. Meanwhile, I imagine the last departing journalist taking one last walk down mainstream to glance up at the once-proud logo of his or her newspaper employer, once brightly lit at night, but now it is dark.

Much like a scene from "The Last Picture Show."

(Finally, as promised, here are the latest figures, an hour later: Gannett's layoffs are up to 1,362 now from 37 papers. That's three hundred and forty-one more confirmed pink slips, or about one every ten seconds, while I've been writing about them...