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.”

Over the past month or so, I’ve been plowing through an extensive stack of resumes to fill some openings on my new team at PBS.

Many of the resumes were sort of sad – those of journalists with impeccable traditional credentials, and no clue what I meant when I asked for work samples that showed creative use of different digital story forms in service of the content.

Call ‘em The Lifeboaters:  “This digital thing is going to be huge, and I’d be proud to learn it from your team!”  Umm, sorry. The ship that you want left 15 years ago. The good news: New ships leave everyday if you’re willing to swim out to the meet them. WordPress.com offers blogs for free. Start there, keep playing, and we’ll talk in a year.

A second pile included people who are incredibly good … at a singular thing. Call ‘em the The One-Skill Wonders: Very adept at slideshows. Or digital video. Or shoveling existing text onto a page. Yes, those are useful skills (and, candidly, they’ve been enough to get very good production jobs at many shops for a long time.) But that’s not what my team is trying to do.

Happily, however, there was a third pile of those resumes: Digital natives (or digital immigrants who work hard to remain conversant) who understand the whiz-bang toys are only useful if they serve the story. They also understand there will be a new whiz-bang tool next year.

My favorite example: One of the candidates is a wizard at a certain vector-graphics program that’s hideously expensive, ridiculously proprietary, notoriously hard to learn – and incredibly useful. Which, of course, leads some to treat it as the Universal Truth to all journalism questions, and to treat themselves as priests.

Not this guy. He wouldn’t bite on my trick question (something about whether this program was the most useful skill he’d ever learned): “The technology is always changing, so I just feel like the ability and willingness to adapt is the best skill someone can have.”

Guess what? He got an interview. So did most of the others in the third pile. They’ll be the ones making up our new team.

It was hard not to notice a few commonalities among them. An awful lot of them passed through Medill at Northwestern, American University in D.C., or Cal-Berkeley. Several also received one of the fabulous summer-long News 21 fellowships.

I’d be horribly remiss if didn’t mention the excellent program at CUNY; as it happens, none of its kids choose to apply. I’d be equally remiss if I didn’t point out that some name-brand journalism schools aren’t on this list – and that’s not an oversight.

The kids in that third stack are solid reporters and great storytellers. When pressed, they talk about technologies as means to an end – tools they can use in service of the story, not as a flashy adornment to it. They also used overly long sentences to offer variations on a motto a longtime colleague used to have on his blog: Semper Gumby – always flexible.)

Of course, one of the people I hired said it far better than I can.

I hope this forms an optimistic riposte to a discerning entry from Wayne MacPhail on PBS’ Media Shift blog. MacPhail makes an impassioned observation that J-schools are failing their students by defaulting to traditional story forms, taught by traditional professors, with barely a mention of the information revolution occurring around us. He’s right.

Too many of my friends – the first-generation digital pioneers now in academe – talk privately about the battles they fight with tenured colleagues who insist that circa-1994 curricula are just fine¸thank you and have served generations of graduates with distinction!

Fortunately for our craft – and for my project – a few schools are taking another path. Some of their grads are going to help us at PBS.

The Journal’s gain, of course, is someone’s loss – the Boston Globe‘s.

Sadly, this is another example of the continuing brain drain of smart digital leaders from traditional newspaper newsrooms. Many who have left talk about the exciting new opportunities at their new organization.

Dave does that – but, as usual, he’s also far more honest about another motivation: “I just didn’t want to live my life managing decline.”

Too true.

Lest we get too maudlin, however: Congrats to Dave for brilliant service to the Boston community for a dozen years, and best wishes on his new adventure.

Similarly, if you check out TwinsBaseball.com, you see video of home runs … but not an equally botched call that cost the Twins (disclosure: my favorite team) the game.

All credit to MLB Advanced Media: The glaring videos are available on the sites. You just have to hunt for them. (The Tiggers’ video is on the story-level page; the Twins/Mariners’ um, “infield single” is utterly buried on the site’s video ghetto.) Frankly, YouTube was easier. (Wondering if MLBAM has take-down notices flying this morning.)

A small thing, perhaps, in a world where cellphone and surveillance video is used as a publicity weapon in an international incident, and a major oil company is behaving like Keystone Kops in the Gulf – but one more tiny example of odd results when the economics of publishing change.

From her online musings on a random Wednesday:

“Sometimes I wish the newspaper was as interesting as my Twitter stream.”

Discuss, please.