Change can suck. It can be ugly and it can be scary. Change can bring your world crashing down around you, and change can make you realize how little control you actually have in this crazy journey called life. It can bring you to your knees, fast, and sometimes unexpectedly.



Of course, after sending off a royalty check to the worldly institute of cliché, I can also say that change is inevitable.



This week, the Seattle P-I printed its last physical edition — massively downsizing and ditching the paper and ink for the World Wide Interweb. After 146 years, reduced revenue and the evolution of the very place that seattlepi.com will now call home — the Internet — made the paper’s demise sad but not surprising to those who follow such things.



Also this week, The News Tribune — owned by the McClatchy Company — announced yet another round of cutbacks intended to maintain and improve profitability. Since the wheels fell off the economic bus, the Trib has made three such rounds of cutbacks, this time planning to trim 7 percent of the paper’s staff and reduce employee pay by 5 to 10 percent. When these latest cuts were announced, Trib publisher David Zeeck was quoted in his paper as saying the Trib maintains profitability, but these cuts are necessary to deal with declining ad revenue. 



The bottom line is, the world as we know it is changing around us. There’s no stopping it. It was inevitable, but it still seems to be catching a surprising number of people off guard.

Change is never easy. It can suck. The P-I’s voice will be sorely missed, and our sympathies go out to those at the Trib that will be let go. In the world of newspapers, it certainly feels like the world is crashing down around all of us.



However, in a dire time like this it’s important to differentiate between daily newspapers and journalism — and this is where the hope lies. While daily newspapers may one day go the way of the dinosaur, the need for competent, responsible journalism will live on. The need for quality (full time) writing and reporting will persist, and the possible end of daily delivered newspapers, ink and all, doesn’t — and won’t — spell the end of one of society’s most important professions. The era of bloated daily newspapers — funded by a virtual monopoly on print advertising dollars — will fade into the past, and what journalists and the industry will be left to do is figure out where to go from there. Sure, there will probably be less money to be made, but any journalist worth their weight in Post-it notes doesn’t do it for the paycheck. Eventually, while we may hit rock bottom first, while things may get far uglier before they improve, while the newspaper industry may devolve into some sort of Mad Max style, apocalyptic melee, journalism will prevail. It must, because it fills a societal need that’s not going anywhere.



A long time ago, in a far away place, someone likely lamented “I just really like the way the stone slab feels in my hands.”



One can only assume they adjusted, as the world of journalism will too.



These are bizarre times we live in, but they’re the only times we’ve got. Fighting the inevitable is a lost cause. What’s needed now is the next chapter of the book.



Rest assured, it will get written — probably by a journalist.