There’s been the usual grumbling about the heartless bastards at corporate, at how these cuts will only further diminish our Noble Religious Calling, etc. – but the reality is these cuts are only going to continue in traditional media.

The financial numbers are awful: Print ad revenue at publicly reporting companies keeps going down, down, down.  Revenue is off by half since the 2006 peak, and has dropped for 20 straight quarters.

And it’s not the economy, stupid (sorry, Carville). Digital ad revenues at most shops continue to grow and the overall interactive ad economy grew by an astounding 23 percent in Q1 vs. the same period in 2010. Does anyone need more proof that the long-predicted seismic shift in ad-spending patterns has happened? Does anyone really think the financial picture will automagically improve? Buehler?

So: what should my newly unemployed friends do?

My erstwhile colleague Mark Potts offered sage advice in this neatly packaged 2009 blog post: 10 Tips for Suddenly Unemployed Journalists.  Some of my former colleagues must have already read it: The LinkedIn tip is No. 5.

I would add only a couple additional thoughts:

1) Start on all of Mark’s tips now – before the Reaper comes.

2) Keep backup files of everything – beat notes, your story ideas and especially your Rolodex. I know too many people whose employers locked their access to their email accounts the moment the layoffs took effect, and who suddenly lost years of carefully organized contact information. (My bosses were kind enough to extract it from Outlook for me. As a printout. Um, thanks.)

3) Get digital. Now. To paraphrase a delicious job-interview story,* there are two kinds of journalists these days: digital ones, and unemployed ones. Start a Tumblr blog, follow Andy Carvin to see  how Twitter can be used as a reporting tool, join ONA – just get in the damn pool.

The future of new is being invented right now, and plenty of traditional journalists are part of it.

But most of them aren’t at their traditional organizations anymore.

*OK, so that’s far from the most-elegant line I’ve ever written. But it gives me an excuse to tell a great story.

Years ago, just before the Great Collapse, a hot-shot job candidate was interviewing with the interactive corporate staff at the place I worked. She was an articulate, high energy MBA from a seriously good business school, and she totally nailed every interview. The team wanted to hire her quite desperately.

So in one of the final meetings in the process, our uber-boss makes an effort to impress her. He looks across the table, and intones in his most sophisticated and leaderly air: “You know, we’re in the process of turning this place into a digital media company.”

The candidate, who by that time had clearly and correctly decided that we were doomed, snapped back: “That’s good – because in about five years, there are going to be only two kinds of media companies: Digital ones, and dead ones.”

The gang at Muppet Labs and I have been building something new, soon to arrive at PBSNews.org. So while there’s only been the sound of crickets over here, there’s lots of hammers banging and saws whirring over there.

Stay tuned – and as that project gets launched (we refuse to mention a date lest we jinx ourselves), there’ll be more here soon.

Promise.

My time working with both GrowthSpur and Localist.com has been a blast. But the chance to work with Christine Montgomery and the crew at PBS was too much to pass up.

I remain involved with GrowthSpur as a member of its advisory board. The team there has better insight than just about anyone into the growth of independent journalism in the blogosphere (and the economic challenges those independent blogs place), and is doing vital work to help invent the future of journalism.

The same could be said about my new work, too. More on that in the coming weeks. Suffice to say that my new social-networking avatar is the guy on the left here.

Astute Muppet watchers will recognize him as Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, chief scientist at Muppet Labs, “Where the future is being invented today.” How cool is that? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

If the prospect of being Beaker-ed doesn’t scare you, I’m still looking for a couple of savvy digital producers who join the new team. Details are at pbs.org/jobs.

Watching all the hoopla – on multiple media platforms at once – gives us all another lesson on the folly of the paid-content argument from some traditionalists.

We’re baseball freaks in this household. I’ve been a fan of the Minnesota Twins since long before the last time they played a home game outdoors. My wife jokes that she was born within sight of Shea Stadium. Our first date included a raucous discussion of which team had denuded their farm system more badly through stupid trades. (Hint: It was the Mets.)  The poor kids didn’t have a choice.

So as the Twins open Target Field today, I’m watching via the MLB Extra Innings package on Verizon FiOS ($179 this year). If I have to run to get one of the kids, I’ll be able to keep an ear on things via Sirius-XM Radio ($12 a month, and baseball is the only reason I keep satellite radio). As backup (or while traveling), I can tap the MLB.TV feed.

As I write this, it’s three hours before the game, and thousands of fellow Minnesotans are gathered outside the stadium. (How do I know? Webcams.)  After the Twins thump the BoSox today (crossed fingers), I’ll read every word I can find, especially on the Star-Tribune’s excellent blogs by LaVelle E. Neal and Joe Christensen. I gleefully wallow in the modern media soup.

Oh – and my wife sprung for a 20-game season ticket package this year for me. Yes, I live 1,250 miles away. Your point?

What’s hard to remember is this sort of overload wasn’t always so. (I had an extended conversation many years ago with a presidential candidate right after my team beat his in the World Series. We swapped stories about the insane lengths we went to – driving to the top of hills outside town! – to pull in games on AM radio skips.)

Not so many years ago that only a handful of each team’s games were televised – maybe 50 a year, almost all of them away games. The troglodyte owners thought that allowing people to watch every game would “devalue the product” and lead inexorably to declining attendance.

They made a couple of basic mistakes: First, they assumed that they were primarily in the business of selling tickets to games – not making money through multiple channels. Second, they thought that watching a game on TV was a perfect substitute for the experience of sitting in the ballpark.

Over the past 25 years or so – thanks in no small part to the phenomenal cable-TV success of some truly awful Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves teams – baseball owners figured it out. Make money by selling TV rights to every game. Split the games up between over-the-air and cable broadcasters. Offer those feeds through any possible medium (even video on mobile devices this year).

Do all that right, and it won’t harm attendance – it’ll whet appetites.

(Yes, one result of this is seemingly absurd contracts. But at least Mauer didn’t sign with the Godless Empire.)

Here’s what this has to do with the eternal (and infernal) paid-content debate: Newspaper owners who stubbornly insist that people will pay for news on the web because, well, they should are behaving like baseball owners of old.

The results speak for themselves.

Instead of fighting to wall off the web, innovate on other platforms – not just the iPad, though that’s a start. Figure out what consumers want in different circumstances, then how to use technology to deliver that information. They won’t always pay for it – but they will sometimes, and there’s an ad model out there for just about every transmission vehicle.

Give your audience what they want – when, where and how they want it. For God’s sake – Bud Selig doesn’t even do e-mail, yet even he was smart enough to figure that out.

(OK, Bob DuPuy figured it out. But Bud let him.)

Monday, another arrived. From Amtrak.

In other words, just like the Northeast Regional trains I used to take every week, Amtrak was late.

I’d call this irony, but it’s not – it’s precisely what I’d expect from Amtrak.

A side note to my journalist friends: Read more on the progress of GrowthSpur and our upcoming training programs here.