I was asked this question, in one form or another, several times at my fantasy baseball draft last night.

It has been nearly three weeks since I was fired by the down-sizing-till-it-hurts San Bernardino Sun after nearly 32 years of service. So, hey, what’s next?

Nothing much.

The report:Nobody is hiring, in the Greater L.A. market. Not for jobs I could/would aspire to. I just got canned by L.A. News Group — Dean Singleton’s collection of suburban dailies — which is about half the total market, and if any of those papers is hiring anyone, it’s desk people for probably less than half of what I was making. And people don’t like to hire 54-year-old journalists who recently made a good salary and might come in with pre-conceived notions about journalism quality.

That leaves the Press Enterprise in Riverside, and I just left the Inland Empire. Not that they’re hiring. And it leaves the Orange County Register, which is dumping people, and the L.A. Times, which historically doesn’t hire from competing newspapers. The End.
I have inquired into teaching, a profession that doesn’t discriminate openly against “old” people and found out that it is in crisis, too, here in California. Talking layoffs; forget about hiring, unless (maybe) you’re a math-science guy, which I’m not. “Worst it’s been in 26 years,” my sister-in-law told me. So that doesn’t look good, short-term.

So, when do I go into financial distress? I was asked that. (Journalists are nosy.) I said probably midsummer, if nothing changes. That’s when my six weeks of severance (one for every five years of service, that is) runs out, and whatever cash at hand I had starts to be depleted.

The journalism market is so bad that what might be openings are disappearing before I can apply. To wit: the International Herald Tribune, based in Paris, historically hires four, five, six temps for the summer, at a nice wage. (And it’s Paris.) I did this job while on sabbatical from Berdoo in the summer of 2001, so they know me. And I was told one of those jobs might still exist for this summer, giving me a chance to make some money without any long-term commitment. But as soon as I inquired into it I found that the IHT has decided it can’t afford any more summer temps, and the 12-14 week gig I aspired to … won’t happen at all.

Some online opportunities are out there, at a greatly reduced salary (I’m OK with that, actually), and my wife might get on fulltime with a web operation, which would ease the situation massively; we could go quite some time with one full-time job (and benefits like, oh, health insurance) between us.

So, I’m not exactly sitting around waiting for someone to call, because that’s not going to happen … but I’m not out looking under every rock in the market, either. Maybe I’m not desperate enough. Probably, I have a sense that something will happen if I wait a month or three.

There’s always the family business: Automotive repair. Not that I can fix anybody’s car, but maybe the fam would bring me on to handle some things in the front of the shop. We’ll consider that more seriously as time goes by.

But I do have an increasing sense that for better or worse, I’m done with print journalism. Or it’s done with me. The industry is in collapse. I’m like a steel worker in Allentown in the 1970s; my industry is going bust. I may have to accept that the rest of my working life I will be like most people: Working at a job I probably don’t love just to make ends meet. I know those are the sorts of “lives of quiet desperation” most people lead, so it can be done.

I just didn’t have to grapple with that in my adult life. Till now.