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I was up in Clearwater last week, filming for our history show, when it really struck me how much the upcoming cuts at The Province and the 麻豆传媒映画Sun newspapers were going to affect our province as a whole. If you're just being made aware, it was announced a couple weeks back that they were 42% of the remaining staff who hadn't yet taken buyouts, and today they made those cuts. It sucks for people living in 麻豆传媒映画who rely on the papers for their news, it sucks for democracy, it sucks bigtime for the journalists and other staff who are losing their jobs (more on that later), but the suck is further reaching than most people living in the city realize.

I grew up in a small town in the Okanagan where every Sunday my dad would put a $5 bill in my little hand and send me to the store to buy him a pack of smokes (!) and a copy of the Sunday Province. I got to spend whatever was left on candy, which was usually about 45 cents. He subscribed to the local paper - the Vernon Daily News - and we also got The Morning Star as a free delivery, but that one thick issue of The Province was what really connected him with what was going on outside of our little village. I imagine it also just made him feel more like a part of British Columbia. When I visit him now, more than 30 years later, he still has recent copies of it laying around. He's one of hundreds of thousands of people outside of the Lower Mainland who rely on it to tell them B.C.'s stories as well as hold those in power to account, and it should go without saying that I am also one of those people.

From what I understand, the cuts they made were dealt out according to seniority. So say you're a hungry and determined young reporter ("young" being under 40) who worked your ass off to deliver the best stories you could, easily adapting to digital or maybe you're actually a digital native, on the leading edge of it... well, you probably got let go today. Less people working at the papers (especially less young people) will soon mean they'll become "not acceptable"; while the circulation numbers and clicks to their websites aren't going to take an immediate hit, the quality of these two products will. I don't want to believe that they won't be salvaged but if something doesn't happen soon to reverse course, well... I just... I don't even know.

We don't typically deal in bummer news here at V.I.A., so while I personally spent the better part of my work day hoping for the best while refreshing Twitter to see who the latest was to be let go, I want to leave you with something great that happened today. Chad Skelton, a former Postmedia employee who took a buyout in 2015, has set up a form where those recently laid off can fill in their details and a master document will be made with all of the folks that are available to take on new jobs. Here's the form below. I'll share the document once he finalizes it with all of their information and contacts.

While it's doubtful the media landscape will be able to absorb every one of these folks that Postmedia threw away, I have faith that they - really good people, all of them - will land on their feet. To everyone who has ever worked at The Province and the Sun, especially those who got let go today: thank you for making British Columbia a much more awesome place over the years. Please keep doing what you do, if not for our 2 major dailies, for someone else.

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