There’s a column by Dale Maharidge on BillMoyers.com that’s getting a lot of attention as it’s shared by journalists, current, retired, or in suspended animation (“What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?“).

Originally published in The Nation magazine, it’s a somewhat dark view of life after reporting, based on interviews of journalists caught up in the great collapse of the news industry over the past couple of decades.

Maharidge write:

Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 Pulitzer Prize–winning ?play Death of a Salesman opens with musical direction: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.” The play follows Willy Loman, past 60, as his grasp on life crumbles amid job troubles. When, at the end of Act II, he reaches his beaten-down end, the melody soars again, this time a requiem. “Only the music of the flute,” writes Miller, “is left on the darkening stage….”

The term ‘seismic shift’ is overused, but it applies to what’s happened to American newspapers.

I heard this flute’s dirge throughout last summer and fall, as I made the rounds talking with downsized journalists — men and women who had gotten hooked on the profession as young, ink-stained idealists, only to find themselves cast out in mid- or later life. These veterans spoke of forced buyouts and failed job searches — of lost purpose, lost confidence, even lost homes. I had known of the decimation of my profession: I’d read the statistics, seen the news articles, watched old friends pushed from jobs as bureau chiefs, editors, senior reporters, into the free fall of freelance. But the texture of their Lomanesque despair surprised me. There were some grim moments.

It reverberates for me, and takes me back to what I wrote back in April 2001, a month after the Star-Bulletin was sold to Canadian publisher David Black, and resumed publishing under the new ownership.

This appeared in the newsletter of the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Life after the Star-Bulletin

By Ian Lind

SPJ Member

It’s now been just over a month since I found myself standing outside the News Building as a parade of soon-to-be-former Star-Bulletin co-workers marched out the doors just after noon, crowded onto the sidewalk, then moved rapidly to the corner and off down South Street towards their future.

I remember Burl Burlingame following the pipers at the head of the procession while pushing a blue Star-Bulletin sales rack rescued from the heart of the old newsroom, and Gordon Pang doing the heavy lifting on a “We Make Waves” sign.

I left with nothing so dramatic. One plastic shopping bag containing several leis received earlier that morning along with a few last items removed from my desk, along with a white large kitchen garbage bag shielding an original caricature by Corky Trinidad, inscribed by departing colleagues with brief expressions of support, regret and hope.

After chronicling the emotional, political, and journalistic ups and downs in the Star-Bulletin newsroom during the 18-months since the paper was first threatened with closure, I found myself in the surprising position of being left behind, literally and figuratively.

More correctly, booted out.

“Your services will not be required by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin after the company assumes ownership of the paper.”

The nut graph of the terse five-sentence letter from John Flanagan had been a surprise. Despite clear signals that the Star-Bulletin’s new management, then operating in exile down at Restaurant Row, was not amused by my online newsroom diary (now available at www.ilind.net), I had an underlying faith that such journalism, even if controversial, might be appreciated, understood, or at least tolerated by professionals.

After all, I figured, it should be obvious that one can’t survive in the ranks of investigative reporters without a bit of an attitude, a proclivity to stir things up and see what happens next. Surely good editors would understand the value of that edge, or so I thought.

I was wrong.

So there I was, after the whirlwind Star-Bulletin procession departed, standing on the sidewalk exchanging empty pleasantries with a few Gannett old-timers, watching history being made by others.

I returned several hours later to collect a modest severance check, and then left the building, and perhaps the daily news business, for the last time.

It felt like graduated high school or college graduation day, when you realize those times are gone and you’re being thrust inexorably ahead, for good or ill. A familiar reality falling away, replaced by both a sense of anxiety and foreboding, as well as possibilities and potentials.

So I’m living through the problems that I speculated on in my online diary back on November 15, 1999, when I recorded this entry:

“Then came Rupert’s announcement and, zip, the world shifts ever so slightly, there’s that feeling of the ground dropping away momentarily, and I can see or feel it all vanishing in an instant. What does an investigative reporter do without a newspaper?

There’s so much investigating to do, but not a lot of ready ways to put the results into public view.

I’m rooted here in Hawaii, and am not likely to venture off to the mainland to fit into another existing newspaper job. So what happens next? It’s a question I’m trying to avoid as long as possible, because it goes into territory full of dragons by forcing a series of questions: If I’m no longer Ian Lind the investigative reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, who am I? And what’s my identity when that security key is disabled and I’ve carried the last box of stuff out to the car and left the second-floor newsroom for the last time? You don’t really want to visit such questions if it isn’t necessary, and I keep hoping that new directions will open up without having to face the identity issues straight on. We’ll see.

It’s been a month, and I’m still waiting for those new directions and potentials to reveal themselves. As I said then, we’ll see.

I faced an immediate identity crisis soon after being cut loose when my SPJ membership renewal notice arrived in the mail.

I admit to a moment’s hesitation but, hoping for the best, I paid my dues and prepared to move on.

I’ve got an office now, with computer, phone, Internet access, and a place to stash my files.

In the short term, I’m slowly committing to a few freelance assignments.

I’m stopped several times a day, sometimes by strangers at bus stops or in the grocery store, asking me what it’s like at the new Star-Bulletin, and I grope around for a polite explanation of my departure from the paper and a suitable description of my current pursuits.

Investigative writer and researcher, sometimes advocate, still seeking to make a difference. Suggestions appreciated.

I still feel much the same sense of rootlessness.

The long term problem is that reporting trains you in a certain skepticism, a wariness towards what others say, how they describe what they do, and an urge to test those words and actions, looking for inconsistencies, warning signs, inflated claims, hidden interests, or unacknowledged bias. Reporters learn to be specific, to distrust official sources, to attribute statements of “fact” to their sources, and then test those sources and their “facts” before accepting them. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to just take things as given, to accept people as what they say they are, because the urge to investigate, to get behind the images and charades, is powerful indeed.

And then there’s the desire to tell the story, as Maharidge heard again and again in his travels through the wreckage of newspapers past.

In any case, it’s a sobering tale. A good story, for sure.