It’s a shame that a lack of planning, a lack of investment in research during the fat years, an inability to recognize expertise in areas outside traditional news, have brought us here.

I work at a major Florida paper. On any given morning, we have three or four managers telling the lone ready-to-quit producer what to do.

We have not one but two bosses for the video producers, one of whom is a neophyte at web video, and the other a nincompoop with no computer, web, or video skills whatsoever.

We have a whole raft of people manning our continuous news desk… but seldom anyone actually out gathering news for them to handle.

Our url’s die within hours; none of the non-story content including photo and video captions is searchable by our search tool nor by Google; good stories with high traffic and high interest disappear just as quickly as any other.

Top-level management confuses stress with urgency; confuses excitability with enthusiasm; confuses crisis with competence. It’s hopeless.

It’s time to put a bullet into it and start over.

I’m saying that after 25 years here….

Most of us who do these things are largely self-taught.

And how did we teach ourselves? Online! We used the Internet to learn how to use the Internet, and how to create and produce here too.

There are thousands of free tutorials about everything you’d like to learn. Just look for them.

I am one of those newspaper dinosaurs who has had to learn about HTML’s and the like on his own. I am an admitted web novice (but I do have the basic skills and don’t need help with my e-mail). One problem for a guy like me who wants to learn, is finding somebody who is willing, and has the time, to share the knowledge. I have been networking, (that is how I found this blog), but it is difficult for a novice like me to find out how to create a hyperlink text and other things that are second-nature to people like you. I know journalism is a different animal today. Not all of us ‘old dogs’ aren’t willing to learn new tricks. All some of us need are the tools.

So while I certainly HOPE journalistic experience (20 years doing newspaper journalism) and local knowledge (14 years covering my town as a reporter or city editor) will be valued, I understand that none of that matters if I can’t work within the medium. You wouldn’t tolerate print reporters who can’t spell, tv cameramen who can’t properly expose a backlit shot or talk-radio producers who can’t work a phone board. Basic knowledge of basic Web functions ought to be a part of everyone’s professional journalism toolkit, and learning this stuff isn’t rocket surgery.

I found my myself actually physically nodding along in agreement.

At times it feels like I imagine it must for someone who jumps off a cliff and realizes part way down that might not have been such a good idea. The difference is we can’t see the bottom yet.

When you say “It’s probably time to just go ahead and move on to something else,” I don’t know if you are saying we should write off newspapers and move on to some other business vehicle for doing journalism, or that we should put behind us picking at our sores.

Call me pollyannish if you like, but I cling to the optimistic belief that we will evolve somehow, some way into the next era.

I don’t agree that anyone who can’t do HTML needs to go. We do need to get our geek on, but to completely discount journalism experience or years of local knowledge of covering a community would be to make the same mistake the guys in the “power chairs” did in dismissing the Internet as an economically inconsequential fad.

I do believe the loss of social currency is the single most critical issue for journalists in newsrooms. We are measuring advertising revenue declines with five decimal precision, but the year-over-year declines in social currency are just as devastating to the health of newspaper/TV news organizations, but just don’t show up on the spreadsheets.