So what did you get for Christmas this year? Being a non-selfish kind of guy I asked for world peace. We’ll see how that one goes. Fortunately I did get a few other things.

My wife bought me the new Acer Aspire One 10” laptop. It’s just over $300. and it is not a powerhouse laptop. You won’t be running hardcore programs on this thing. What makes it so cool is that it weights just over two pounds and is super small but still usable. There will be a lot of ultra compact notebooks coming onto the market in the very near future but they really will be a pain to use with their equally tiny keyboards.

I plan on using mine as a surfing computer in the evenings and for sending back photos to the paper. I have a “real” laptop but the thing is just too big and heavy to carry on a daily basis. My buddy Kenny saw it and went out and bought himself an extra Christmas present. Kenny is da man, he isn’t even a little bit afraid of his wife.

One of the other cool gifts I received was a throwback to the 70’s. Dick’s Sporting Goods has a retro electric football game. The little plastic players are put on the metal field and a vibrating motor moves them around the field. I haven’t taken it out of the box yet because the last time I played I was 12, (I’m 42 now). I have a feeling I may be a bit underwhelmed. I’ll be curious to see what my sons think. As members of Generation Xbox they are used to playing football with characters that look and move like the real thing.

So what did you get?

The news business is in a state of change. We are no different than any other industry — we feel the impacts of job losses and a free-falling economy. For many years, some papers were fortunate enough to cling to the old ways of doing things and ran along fat and happy.

But you can only do that for so long before the reality of change sneaks up and leaves you reeling and looking for a quick fix. Most papers did buyouts of tenured employees, and many left unfilled many positions within their newsrooms. But attrition in the news business can be slow, especially when the jobs are drying up like a bad wellspring in the desert.

A lot of us have said goodbye to coworkers as they were laid off and jobs were consolidated. The popular term in the news biz is getting right sized. That means you need X amount of people to put out X number of papers. It hurts to see change that impacts good people. It hurts to see people leave a job to which they gave their heart and soul. And make no mistake: The news business isn’t just a job, nor is it just a career. This business defines who you are as a person. If you are sloppy, biased, unreliable or untrustworthy, you are gone.

A real journalist is a bit of an idealist — they really believe they can do something good by reporting the story as well as the story behind the story.

So why am I on this bent today? Well, this morning, a large newspaper just east of our little paper told their people to stay home and wait for a phone call. Sometime between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m., 27 of them would get a call letting them know if their services no longer were needed. If they didn’t get that call, then they were allowed to report to work.

Wow! Merry Christmas people.

There are a lot of different ways to let people know that they don’t have a job anymore. None are good. But short of random newsroom executions, I can’t think of a more classless way to tell people they are history. To my fellow journalists at a certain big paper in a certain big city 25 miles east of Elyria, I just want to say we are thinking of you all this morning and wish you all the best.