Life in the stalled lane

Ouch! How I hate delay's.
We were supposed to have our bags packed and be moving to middle America today.
And, we've been delayed. There are several reasons, all good ones, but it doesn't make the waiting any better.
I just learned that one of my newspaper mates has taken on a new job in South Dakota, Souix Falls to be exact. I am very happy for him. He will be leaving a huge number of people that call him friend, he will be moving to a place where his circle of friends will just grow more.
Through the "blogwork" he will be able to maintain past friendships and ever increase the new ones.
I am sorry about the newspaper he is leaving. It was once a fine paper. I worked there for more than 27 years. When I first started out taking classified ads by phone, the nick-name was "Wretched Flashlight." Oh my, that didn't bode well. But the people who worked there had character and heart and stick-to-itivness. Even though the town may have had names for the newspaper, it respected the people who worked there. Even though I knew I would get harrassed for saying where I worked, others respected me for working with the newspaper industry.
As time went by, I, along with a large group of caring, dedicated people saw the newspaper lose it's negative names and was looked at as a real source of news and diverse opinion. This did not happen in just a couple of years, it happened over 10 to 15 years.
Today's Record Searchlight is a shadow of its former self. It happened in less than two years.
I moan over the writing gaffs, I wail over the lost jumps from one page to another, I even rail about the stories that have been cut in mid-sentence to make the story fit. The loss in advertising creativity is a whole other story.
But it's the loss of the people that make me the most sad. It started with a few lay-offs, then one huge buy-out offered to many employees. Most of them took the buy-out, they could see the winds of change. This left huge holes in many different departments. Then as the winds changed to a storm, more people just left, off to different life avenues.
What is left now? A newspaper with no real sense of history for it's own coverage area. A youthful group of wanna-be's that are playing at newspapering. The people who can't leave are trying valiantly to cope with so many of these changes that don't make sense to them, but they need to remain loyal.
Change is good if it's done with purpose, but change just for the sake of something that looks different and might attract people because it's been "dumbed-down" is not for the better of our community.
The hard stories and facts need to be told. Commerce continues through the town due to the quality of advertising. Each piece of a newspaper adds to the information pipeline that goes directly to it's readers. That's the newspaper's job.