Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative life after layoff

It’s the wee hours of Tuesday morning as I write this and I suppose I’m keeping a sort of vigil: Today before 9:30 a.m., 27 of my friends and former colleagues at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, will be laid off.

The PD is hardly the only American newspaper to undergo this agony in recent years. Many, from the New York Times on down, have had to let people go, because the daily-paper industry is imploding. But to see the PD finally have to capitulate is terrifying. The Newhouse family, whose Advance Publications chain owns Cleveland’s major daily, vowed years ago that they would not lay their people off. They kept that promise for a long time, relying on hiring freezes, attrition and buyouts (such as the one I took in 2006) to try to reduce their workforce less painfully .

And now even they have had to give in. The already sparse PD staff will show up today and find 27 of their number missing, like overnight battle casualties or victims of epidemic: By their absence they shall be known. 

Because it’s horrifying to watch your industry implode, taking with it the youth and passion you invested in it, as well as the standing and influence you earned through years of hard experience, it’s easy to equate these wrenching job losses with death. I’m sure it will feel like a kind of death to the ones who get that call this morning.

But what they and all of us in the news business need to remember are these two things: Humanity will always need reliable information; and this cataclysm in our industry is the single greatest test of journalists’ creativity that most will face in our lifetime.

Many of us have had to leave these jobs at an advanced age, professionally speaking. It may seem impossible for us to both reinvent ourselves in other types of jobs and regain the rewards and reputations we had already worked so long to deserve. But it’s not impossible and it’s what we have to do, not just for ourselves but for civilization.

That sounds rather grand, but I think most of us career journalists believe deeply in the vital need of a free society for a free press that uncovers both important facts and important truths. We need to tell those stories differently now - online if not on paper, from new perspectives and in a new language whose alphabet includes the most inventive technologies. 

And I think there’s room for all of us who want to try. Geniocity.com is my attempt and I have big plans for it. I hope my friends who find themselves to be former PDers today will grieve as they must, then take a  breath and realize that they have a chance many people never get in later years – a chance for one more creative adventure, to say yes to the unanswered part of themselves and change the world by working for good in a new way.