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by Kemila Velan

SAN FRANCISCO, DENVER, SEATTLE, ANN ARBOR — Newspapers – San Francisco Chronicle, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer , The Ann Arbor News, Sun-Times Media Group – are falling like dominoes. Perhaps it’s because us newspaper people write such played out cliches!

Nah, it has something more to do with this “recession…” which has actually escalated into a “depression,” according to the New York Times.

If you ask me, it has more to do with this thing called the Internet. Technorati is currently tracking more than 70 million blogs a day, according to Blog World Expo. And with writer-friendly Hostwire.com offering cheap hosting at $3/month (and consultants who understand the unorganized, often scattered minds of right-brain creatives!), it’s no wonder that the reign of the newspaper is coming to a close. Biscayne Writers has been tracking this trend since September 2008, while leading a blog writing course at Miami-Dade College.

The good news is that more people have a voice. The bad news is that more people have a voice.

“Do young people realize that their personal experiences mean nothing to me?” said Sandy Close, Executive Editor and Director of New America Media in San Francisco at an editorial meeting this week. “I’m not interested in blogs, I want at least 3 sources – people I don’t know. That’s what reporting is – telling the stories of other people.”

She’s absolutely correct – in this ever-growing blogosphere, where celeb gossipers like Perez Hilton can dish any ol’ crap into the public domain -  journalists who are getting laid off from their traditional print publications shouldn’t be so forlorn about the loss of their comfy armchairs. They have an outlet, and if they have been covering a particular beat for a traditional print publication for years…AND they had a significant audience, a lot of the work is already done for them.

Take me, for example.

I left my traditional print publication, The Biscayne Times, in early 2006 in the hopes of becoming an independent writer who can pay herself, rather than waiting for a publisher to sign a check. I soon became the voice of The Angel Journal, a blog, E-Newsletter and print publication (yes, print is still relevant, but only as a promotional tool to drive traffic to the web site!).

I was able to build a database of about 8,000 subscribers and started selling advertising after a year, however, the larger company that helped me start it up was slowly going downhill and eventually The Angel Journal went the way of dot.bombs in the late 1990s.

Since then, I’ve been slowly building BiscayneWriters.com, a blog that provides resources and online workshops to writers in the Miami area (and now the San Francisco Bay area). From Biscayne Bay to the San Francisco Bay, I’ve got my pulse on the writing world for all you laid off writers!

So, stop crying, you pessimistic journalists! Go to Hostwire.com and get going like Russell Morse did…