Richard Aregood: Every time you look, there are buyouts and layoffs at newspapers

TO PARAPHRASE

myriad deejays, the hits just keep on coming.

We're not talking about yet another playing of "Stairway to Heaven," or even "Seasons in the Sun," however annoying you might find that prospect. For people who work for newspapers, the last 15 years or so have been an unrelieved and seemingly unending chain of disasters.

I just finished a column for a North Dakota paper about the sudden early retirement of the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, who cited unrelenting personal attacks from bloggers and Internet commenters as his reason. I suspect he wasn't telling the half of it. His newspaper wasn't much before the cutbacks started, but the economic climate has made trying to cover the news a frustrating ordeal, especially after Bismarck suffered a catastrophic flood. Personal insults are a nasty icing on that cake.

It's more dramatic at a smaller paper, but it's happening everywhere. I marvel at how well papers like the Inquirer, Daily News and Minneapolis Star Tribune have somehow kept up quality as advertising and circulation losses chip away at them. Last column, I praised the local reporting in the Daily News, reporting that stands up for every Philadelphian, reporting that has even won a Pulitzer Prize for standing up for the powerless.

Some of my fellow Daily News alumni took exception to my remark that the reporting has "never been better," citing the great tradition of the DN and its consistent performance over a very long time.

They're right - and so am I. As Mike Sokolove, once a reporter at both the Inquirer and the Daily News, now a writer for the New York Times Magazine, put it in a Facebook message, "The reporting might be better than ever, they just won a damn Pulitzer, but the truth is there's so little of it because even before the redesign the paper was decimated."

Get ready for some new challenges. The paper you're reading has been very attractively redesigned. It also has less space for news than it had before, part of the rationale behind the redesign that sacrificed the Harry Gross column many of us miss. But just as we get used to that (we Daily News readers love our paper and have shrugged off rumors about its health since 1925), come the events of the last couple of weeks.