Yes, things are ugly and getting uglier.

Somebody (usually dozens or even hundreds of somebodies) is being laid off in print journalism every day. And with Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, filing for bankruptcy on Monday, a batch of people I know who were hoping to have a cash bridge into some other career … apparently now won’t get any of that money for who-knows-how-long.

Meantime, newspapers seem to be getting smaller and dumber and more low-rent. Perhaps the nadir for the L.A. Times was its Web site running the famous main photo of a pussy cat — meant to grab page views but not to deal with any serious issues in a deadly serious world.

Newspaper operators, increasingly desperate, seem to be chasing the market down into the intellectual dumpster. Dumbing down, which has the added benefit of often being easier to do — especially when your staff is too thin to cover hard news, and the people you have left in the newsroom barely know their way around City Hall or a press box.

But not everyone has given up. It isn’t 100 percent retreat and retrench, out there.

Let me tell you what I did, at work, on Tuesday:

I am doing a temporary editing job with the International Herald Tribune out of its Hong Kong office.

The IHT always has been a serious, meaty newspaper. Americans abroad have known that for decades. Those of you of a certain age remember your first trip to Europe, and wondering what the heck was going on back home, or in the rest of the world, and buying the IHT from some kiosk on the pavement in Paris or Prague or Palermo, and catching up on things. The IHT acquired a sort of romantic place in your head, didn’t it? It was what you read while sitting in the cafe in Montmartre. And that memory stuck, of feeling informed and erudite as you traveled the world — whether it was for a week or a year.

Even if the IHT didn’t always have a lot of pages (16-page papers were not unusual, in tougher times a few years back), it always had the most serious news from all over the world, and often lots of it — in part because it has fairly small and condensed body type, and small headlines. Lots of verbiage gets in there.

The IHT now is owned solely by the New York Times, which is one of the holdouts on holding the line on real journalism, in the United States and elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal is the other that comes to mind. Some of the bigger American metros may be still doing most of what they once did … but I can’t say I actually know they do. The L.A. Times, a serious competitor with the New York Times a decade ago, has gone the wrong way, for sure.

Anyway, I know what it’s like to be in a shrinking newsroom where the mandate is something along the lines of “reaching the Lowest Common Denominator” as the reader.

So let me just remind everyone it isn’t like that everywhere, and maybe it doesn’t have to be.

I worked a shift on the news rim, in the office yesterday, and these are the stories I edited for the Wednesday paper:

–Pakistan’s arrests of 20 people potentially involved in the terror attack of Mumbai. Lots of Lashkar-al-Taiba stuff in there.

–A 1,500-word piece examining two upcoming books that shed light on the history of nuclear proliferation. Did you know nukes are much harder to make than popularly thought?

–About 1,000 words on a task force recommending that the U.S. create an “interagency panel” designed to anticipate genocidal outbreaks around the world, and try to head if off.

–More than 1,000 words on the planning for the Barack Obama inauguration, and how his people are trying to strike a balance between the celebratory and the serious in tough economic times.

–And the “puff” piece of the day, more than 1,000 words on how Filipinos continue to volunteer for tough jobs in the merchant marine industry, despite the risks of piracy, etc., because one or two gigs on a tanker yields more money than a year working a regular job back home in Manila.

That is some serious journalism. And I was involved in it.

No one in the newsroom here was pushing for photos of kitties or trying to get the word “sex” in a headline on the front page. It never even was considered.

So, people, take heart. Some places still are doing this right — and are being rewarded by huge Web traffic (nyt.com gets twice as many hits as the next most popular newspaper Web site) and circulation that is ebbing very slowly, and not hemorrhaging.

Maybe newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal can serve as role models for where we ought to go.

And maybe where that is … is as slimmed-down but quite-serious journalistic entities, clever and cutting edge, but committed to quality and First Amendment issues. Maybe even in an online-only format.

Perhaps that will mean a smaller audience. And a new economic model. Perhaps non-profits, or maybe some local wealthy person is willing to not-make-money on a news source that improves the quality of life in a city or a region, and lets readers know what is going on in local government.

Somebody out there is going to have to provide content, and someone else is going to need to edit it and present it.

Anyway, it’s not over. Not if me, Mr. SoCal Sports, can find a place for 17 weeks editing journalism with heft (did you know The Associated Press and the NYT/IHT use different spellings on several of the more prominent Pakistani terror subjects?) … and knowing I can go buy that paper all around Hong Kong. Heck, all around Asia. Today.

Serious journalism still exists. It is doing well. It is being done well. It could come back to Where You Live. I believe it will, and some of you just laid off will be paid to do that journalism.