It was either Mark Twain or Rod Stewart who once said that every picture tells a story " don't it? But while a picture is still worth 1,000 words and all that other good stuff, sometimes that actual story isn't exactly what we think it is. Consider a photograph of young Denver Post journalist Elizabeth Hernandez, sobbing on a colleague's shoulder, that went viral after she and her colleagues were told that 30 people on their already emaciated news staff will be losing their jobs in the coming weeks -- the latest blow to the ever-shrinking American newspaper industry.
Elizabeth Hernandez @ehernandez
Hi, @ rgay. I'm the journalist crying in this @ washingtonpost column (http:// wapo.st/2HEz2Za ) on cuts to the @ denverpost newsroom by a greedy hedgefund trying to destroy newspapers. Know anyone who likes democracy and has the means to buy us from our owner?
I know, I know ... you've heard this story a million times as the agony known as the 21st century has unfolded. The internet is killing American journalism. No one reads newspapers anymore, and there's no real way for anyone to make money from the nano-pennies earned from every online click (unless you're a massive vampire squid like Facebook or Google), and so the money to pay young and once enthusiastic journalists like 25-year-old Elizabeth Hernandez just isn't there. Too bad.
The only problem is that this is not the real story of why Hernandez -- No. 1 on the layoff list since she was just hired back at the Post three weeks ago, by editors who had no clue that a financial neutron bomb was about to go off -- and her colleagues wept. While the bigger problems of modern journalism are as true in Denver as everywhere else, the real problem at the Post is the shady financial shenanigans of the vulture capitalists who bought the paper's parent a few years back, stripped it down like a Pittsburgh steel mill, and left a major American city with a tiny Alamo-like band of journalists surviving to report on its civic life and keep an eye on its politicians.