Is there life – or work – after news­pa­pers? A lot of us are in the process of find­ing out. Because it’s gen­er­ally a some­what lonely endeavor, it struck me, in Jan­u­ary 2010, that it might be com­fort­ing – and pos­si­bly very pro­duc­tive – to go through it together.

Dis­placed Jour­nal­ists is intended to be a com­mu­nity – our com­mu­nity – where we find com­mon ground, where we can begin to pick our­selves up, dust our­selves off and get on with our lives and livelihoods.

I hope our site will be a place where we can build on our tech skills so we can get back in the game or com­pletely rein­vent our­selves, hatch new ideas and strate­gies, and explore whole new fields of study. We can do it. We still have the brains and the tal­ent that took us so far in our careers.

This will be a forum in which we can learn from defeat and share in our vic­to­ries. On our Face­book Page, we have plenty of non-journalists and employed jour­nal­ists. They are with us because they care about the state of jour­nal­ism in our soci­ety and what we stand to lose as news­pa­pers cut staff or close doors and online jour­nal­ism takes off into uncharted ter­ri­tory. It’s extremely gen­er­ous of them to join the com­mu­nity. I think they have a great deal to con­tribute and I hope they will join in our discourse.

In time, we will be proac­tive in iden­ti­fy­ing employ­ers who might not real­ize that we are the peo­ple they seek to hire. Sea­soned jour­nal­ists have a unique skill set: We have a strong work ethic; we can become instant experts on almost any topic; we cher­ish per­fec­tion; we are curi­ous about every­thing; we honor dead­lines with ease; we love to inter­act with peo­ple, and we never, never, never give up.

Remem­ber: We know the dif­fer­ence between their, there and they’re. Lots of writ­ers these days don’t. We come from news­rooms that gave us the man­date and the con­fi­dence to inter­view any­body, any­where, any­time. We can call gov­ern­ment offi­cials at any hour and expect them to pick up. We know how to get inside people’s heads, to ask the tough ques­tions and to write about com­plex mat­ters clearly and con­cisely. We under­stand com­mu­nity. And, yes, we do under­stand the nature of the Internet.

Our skills are still rel­e­vant. It’s just the infra­struc­ture that has changed. We can and will find new ways to exer­cise our tal­ent. Once again we will feel val­ued and appre­ci­ated, and we’ll earn a liv­ing in the process. And we’ll do it together, pri­mar­ily here, but also in the com­mu­ni­ties we’ve already cre­ated on Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Susan Older

Founder, Dis­placed Journalists