So this is what it feels like ...

As I write this, I am in the first week of my second year of unemployment.





This is very strange to me. From the time I got my first job in journalism in September 1979 until I was fired last January, I always worked. And I didn't just "work." In most cases and in most places, I was a valued employee.

In my entire career as a journalist, I was fired once.

Unfortunately, that came when I was 58 years old and the economy -- particularly in the newspaper business -- was terrible.

Now we're seeing unemployment soaring in almost every sector, and nearly everyone else losing a job is worse off than I am. I have a wife who has a great job; she makes more than 250 percent of the most I ever made as a journalist.

So while things have been a little tighter than usual -- fewer weekends in Las Vegas, for instance -- we have been blessed. We haven't missed out on anything that matters.

Still, I feel like crap. I've had exactly one job interview in 12 months, and that was for a job that wasn't really a great fit. I may never work for a paycheck again. I'm hopeful that the book I'm writing will sell and make up for that, but as I said, the only damage losing my job has done is to my self-esteem.

So many people have it worse. Our economy is a disaster, and all the Republicans can offer is more tax cuts for the wealthy.

I think it's time to make them irrelevant.

Time to get this country back to where it was, working for the middle class instead of the fat and bloated of the world.

It's probably too late for me, but I don't want my children and grandchildren living in Rush Limbaugh's America.

We need to get back to where we once belonged.

Too much, not too little, to write about

It has been almost two weeks since I posted anything here.

It happens, usually because I don't have anything I want to say. But for the last 12-13 days, there have been all sorts of things I've wanted to write about, but I have been feeling sort of overwhelmed by it all.

For instance, politics. Do I write about the marvel of President Obama, or about how happy I am to see eight years of Bush and Cheney in my rear-view mirror? Do I write about how proud I am to see executive orders banning torture and closing Guantanamo, or how annoying it is to see the Republicans -- roundly rejected by voters in December -- still holding out for their agenda as part of the stimulus package?

Or my family? My wife has been going through an extremely difficult time lately with a skin problem, and it is causing her a great deal of anxiety.

How about the fact that it's a year now that I have been out of work? I'm reaching the point where I'm wondering if I'll ever have another real job and thinking maybe I should at least do some volunteer work.

Then there's this crazy winter. We had eight or nine days in a row recently of temperatures in the 80s at the same time most of the country was suffering through record and near-record cold.

There has been a lot, and I'm not going to write about any of it today. I'm just going to post this and get back into the habit of posting.

More tomorrow.

Rice selection brings back memories

I was pleased that Jim Rice got elected to the baseball Hall of Fame the other day.

After all, there aren't that many Hall of Famers that I can claim as roommates.

Yes, I used to work in Anderson, S.C., which is famous for being the great Red Sox outfielder's home town. I worked there from August 1983 to May 1984, when I left for what I thought was my shot at the big time in St. Louis.

During that time, I shared a lovely three-bedroom condominium on Lake Hartwell with two colleagues from the Anderson Independent-Mail. One was a Southern good old boy named Cole, whose last name is lost to me in the mists of memory. The other was Jim Rice.

Editor's note: Mike ...

It's true. My roommate's name was Jim Rice. It just wasn't the same Jim Rice who hit 39 home runs and had 126 RBI for the Boston Red Sox in 1983.

My roommate was a little guy from West Virginia who had never met his more famous namesake; he certainly wasn't related to him.

But there is one thing interesting about this story. Kids all over the country who have baseball cards send them to the particular player and ask for autographs. I'm sure most of the requests for Rice went to Boston, but apparently a good number of them were simply addressed to "Jim Rice, Anderson, SC."

At least some of those came to my roommate.

"What do you do with them?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "I sign them -- 'Best Wishes, Jim Rice' -- and send them back," he said.

"24" is a show worth watching live

For the most part, I stopped watching television a couple of years ago.

That doesn't mean I don't watch any shows. I do. But by either renting or purchasing DVDs of full seasons, I manage to control my viewing experience in at least three ways that make it more enjoyable.

First, no commercials.

Second, I can watch when I want to watch. Yes, I know about Tivo and other DVRs, but I choose not to go that route.

Third, I can watch entire seasons at whatever pace I want. If I feel like watching five episodes in one day, I can. And I don't have to sit through the weeks when the shows I'm watching are pre-empted or in reruns.

That's what I do with the few shows I choose to watch, and it's what I did for the first five seasons of "24." Two years ago, though, I decided I wanted to experience the show the way other people were; it is, after all, a water-cooler show. So I watched Season Six and saw Valencia get nuked, saw Jack's dad kill his brother and in the season climax, saw Jack battle his dad.

Then came the writers' strike and there was no "24" in 2008. Just another bad occurrence in a pretty bad year for me -- my dad died, I lost my job, we rented out our house and my 25-year fantasy baseball league gave up the ghost.

I did gain a granddaughter, which more than balanced out the rest. Except for "24." I missed "24" and Jack Bauer.

But as of tonight, Jack is back and the world is safe. Sure, he tortures. Sure, he kills. But he's our torturer and killer, and he never messes with anyone who doesn't deserve it.

So there were two hours tonight and two tomorrow night and then we'll settle in for 20 weeks of one hour at a time.

I'm stoked.

Jury service was very frustrating

I recently completed jury service that wound up lasting for at least part of five different weeks; I was a sworn juror in a murder trial that involved one dead body, two defendants, two different Los Angeles gangs and a drive-by shooting.

Nobody got convicted, even though I could give you good odds that both men were guilty.

All that happened was that I got to see a lot of the frustrations police and prosecutors must have serving as the thin line between us and total anarchy.

There are a lot of crimes -- murders even -- that are never charged and never come to trial. Without circumstancial evidence or eyewitnesses, there's simply no way to convict a defendant.

In our trial, two members of one gang -- the shooter and the driver -- were on trial for killing one member of a rival gang and wounding two others. One of the two who had been wounded was an eyewitness to the shooting, which took the life of his closest friend.

He had identified the two men in a police interrogation and in the preliminary hearing in February. But by the time of our trial, he was starting to feel the pressure to stop being a "snitch." He recanted his testimony, saying that he had lied earlier.

This was serious business. Snitches get killed and so do their families, so our witness actually had shown a great deal of courage earlier and just couldn't sustain it.

We were asked to believe he had told the truth earlier and was lying now, and there were too many people of the jury who just couldn't make that leap of faith. It didn't help that the young man who basically appointed himself our jury foreman was as close to a bleeding heart as you see these days.

We acquitted the driver and hung 11-1 for acquittal on the alleged shooter.

Our foreman was practically weeping. He told us he was "heartbroken" that we couldn't agree on an acquittal for the other young man, and that he might have to spend more time in jail if the district attorney chose to try the case again.

I felt like suggesting he get a testosterone shot, but I didn't.

When several of us -- not including our foreboy -- talked with the DA after the verdicts were announced, she disabused us of any notion that these were good guys wrongly accused. Both of them were already serving time on other violations, and the driver had actually done time for a murder he had committed as a juvenile.

I asked her why she had brought the case, given such a small hope of victory.

"It's my job," she said. "I feel like I owe it to the people in the community who will come forward to try the case."

I wasn't the holdout. I didn't see any point in it, but in retrospect I wish I had held out on both men. Not that it would have made any difference, but if folks are going to make the Sisyphean attempt to push the boulder up the hill, the more help they get the better.

Time to consider a new model for America's newspapers

"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."
--Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart. 1799

Was freedom of the press ever intended to be only for the men -- or women -- who own the presses?

That's the way we look at it now, when "press" has been extended to mean "media," and the constitutional protection given to newspapers has been claimed by radio, television and Internet outlets.

It's like the old joke about the Golden Rule, that he who has the gold makes the rules. The ownership of our newspapers has gone from people who love journalism, people who bleed ink, to people who care for little more than the balance sheet.

Thousands of journalism jobs were cut across the country last year not because the companies that owned them were in trouble, or because they were failing to show a profit. Oh, sure, some exceptions prove the rule. But the Rupert Murdochs, the Sam Zells and the Dean Singletons cut, combine and consolidate because they need outrageously high profit margins to handle the massive amounts of debt they took on to expand their companies.

When I was working in Ontario, Calif., in the mid 1990s, something our publisher said always used to annoy me. Mike Ferguson managed the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin for Donrey Media, and he always used to tell us that the Associated Press could cover the Los Angeles Dodgers for us, but only we could cover Ontario High School.

It annoyed me because he was right, and because it meant I didn't get to cover the Dodgers anymore. Up until Media News and Dean Singleton acquired our paper in 1999, we did a bang-up job of covering our local communities. You could get world, national, state and regional news from a lot of sources, but if you wanted to know what was happening in our cities, you had to read the Daily Bulletin.

That's why local newspapers mattered, and why they still matter. There are three cities with population of more than 150,000 in the Bulletin's circulation area, and no one covered them like we did. We had the resources and we cared enough to do the job well.

The Ontario City Council might try to deceive citizens, but we didn't let them get away for it for long. The Chino Valley school board might be a mess, but we made sure the people it served were well aware of it.

We made money, too. I can't deny that the economy was different, but I never understood why a business that made a lot of money during good times shouldn't take some of that money and use it to get through the bad times. You can do that if you're part of a small group, or if you're owned by a family that cares about the news.

You can't do it if you're part of a big corporation with stockholders and debt service. Every quarter has to stand on its own, because Wall Street and the investment banks are always watching.

So Dean Singleton buys papers and then immediately starts looking for ways to cut costs and improve profits. Our newsroom lost 30 percent of its staffing the first year, and that was only the beginning. After that, all sorts of coverages started getting combined, first with the San Bernardino Sun and then with the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Our business section, which was basically a page, went from covering an area from San Dimas in the west to Fontana in the east to one that eventually stretched all the way east to Barstow and up into the Victor Valley. That made it nearly impossible to do something that had been our bread and butter, writing stories about local small businesses.

When Singleton bought the two papers, both the Sun and the Bulletin had a business editor and a business reporter. Four people. By 2007, one person was doing the work those four did eight years earlier.

You can't cover the news that way. All you can do is juggle coverages, eliminating some and adding others and hoping folks won't notice. So we started missing city council meetings, and instead did things like wasting an entire day for a reporter and a photographer trying to catch Lindsay Lohan doing her community service in Pomona.

But there's the balance sheet, and the bean counters will tell you that's all the coverage we can afford. Classified advertising has all but vanished and display advertisers have cut way back and might never return.

No question. It's hard times, but I keep coming back to Jefferson. Remember that he said given the choice between newspapers and government, he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

We shine the light.

We expose the wrongdoers.

That's our mission. Imagine Watergate without the Washington Post, or with a Washington Post so concerned about its balance sheet that it didn't have the manpower to go after such a longshot of a story.

Yes, newspapers in the current model are in big trouble. But why do we think the current model is the only way to go? Why not accept the possibility that maybe an industry with a constitutional protection ought to be something different? Why not take the profit motive out of it and make newspapers not-for-profit organizations?

It's worth considering.

Otherwise all we're going to see are more and more cuts, less and less coverage and fewer and fewer readers.