Where do I go now

I've been thinking about Dan Rather a lot lately.

I know. Weird, right?

More precisely, I've been thinking about Dan Rathers, a doll I named when I was 3 years old. (The resemblance between actual Dan Rather and my Dan Rathers doll is difficult to discern. The doll is 7 inches tall, has brown polyester pants and bright red hair. I can't honestly recall how the anchor looked in the 70s.)

Clearly I was a news junkie from an early age. (Not many other 3-year-olds name dolls after anchors, I'm guessing.)

Regardless of early obsession with broadcast journalism, I ended up in newspapers. I fell in love with them from the first time I worked on a student paper. I made my own major in college, being one of very few who graduated with an independent major in journalism. It was prestigious to be allowed to follow that path.

And although it took me longer than expected to graduate, I ended up at a daily paper right after Sept. 11.

I spent the majority of the past decade working at daily newspapers in smaller communities. But while the papers themselves were relatively small - circulations of roughly 30,000 - the companies that owned them were big.

I reflect on this now, as I look at the last few days of my employment at a daily newspaper. I'm not just losing my job; my profession is disappearing. There is not going to be another newspaper that is going to hire me. Across the board, we are being laid off.

So, I now join the ranks of the thousands of journalists who are unemployed. Where, exactly, do we go from here?