That was the subject line on the e-mail I received yesterday from a friend of mine, David Lassen, and since he was working as a columnist in the print industry, it was hard to imagine “They got me” was going to be anything good. Maybe as the butt of a practical joke. You know, “Boy, they really got me with that one!”

As is usually the case, these past two ugly years, “They got me” was about exactly what you’re afraid it would be about.

David Lassen, columnist for the Ventura County Star, good guy with an incredible work ethic, one of the most knowledgeable hockey writers in the greater Los Angeles market,  a friend of mine and a frequent contributor in the comment section of this blog … was laid off Tuesday.

Almost 25 years with the company … four weeks severance (and that may have included accrued vacation) … and good luck in the future.

Well, I like to think someone wished him luck. But that’s the romantic in me.

And here I thought David might escape the grim reaper.

The scythe really came down starting about two years ago. And some of the most vulnerable employees in SoCal sports writing were sports columnists.

You might think a struggling newspaper would want to hang on to its best-known writers, but editors and publishers zeroed in on columnists almost from the start because they tended to be some of the best-paid people in the newsroom. I was one of them, but the number of columnists fired, forced out, moved … was staggering.

By January of a year ago, when Steve Dilbeck of the L.A. Daily News was dismissed, there were so few sports columnists left in the SoCal print business that I thought perhaps David would be spared.

Maybe management there was smarter than at other places. They realized it would be a bad idea to get rid of Mr. Ventura County Sports.

And he survived several rounds of cuts.

But things turned particularly grim, a week ago, when Scripps, which owns The Star, announced it was moving all its Ventura newsroom production jobs to Corpus Christi. As in Texas. Ventura copy editors and designers could reapply for their jobs — in Corpus Christi.

And, then, yesterday, David was let go.

I told him he shouldn’t take his firing personally. (As opposed to some of the rest of us.)  He hung on so long, it seems clear to an outsider that management really did want to keep him. Finally, with much of the newsroom headed for Texas (or unemployment),  they apparently decided they couldn’t afford to keep around a veteran guy who just happened to have the sort of institutional knowledge that newspapers so desperately need.

David apparently has the option of applying for a job in Corpus Christi, in May.

He wasn’t alone, in calling Feb. 16, 2010, his last day.  The sports editor got it, and so did the features editor.

David has blogged about his demise on his personal site. Which won’t load for me here in the United Arab Emirates, but perhaps it will for you. His blog address is davidlassen.com, if you’d like to go at in that direction.

It all rather numbing. So many people, put on the street in their primes. So much knowledge and good will squandered. And newspapers rebuild from these self-inflicted wounds … how?

I suggested to him that he could think of this as a chance to 1) do the things he always wanted to do but never could because he was writing a column and a game story 4-5 times a week and 2) take into account that the trite “you’ll look back on this and be happy about it” thing … is generally true.

And there is this: Do we really want to stay till the Bitter End at desperate, dying  publications, tacking on a few more months just to be around when the paper really does finish circling the drain?

Nope. Best to move on before that. Take to the life rafts. Whether that means a new field entirely,  whether it means hooking up with somebody in another part of the country (or another country altogether) it represents a chance to get out of what perhaps was turning into a rut.

For many of us at the other end of this process, being forced out really was a good break, because we’re doing something more rewarding now than we would have, had we stuck around.

Sure, maybe a year of minimal income and no health insurance is coming up, for David … but something else is out there and, as I promised him, he will get there.

My condolences for his current pain … and my congratulations on future fulfillment.