Since the start of the year, I’ve seen several spikes in the traffic to my How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist series. Not coincidentally, almost every one of those spikes coincided with a wave of layoffs. So when I saw another spike this morning, I knew something was up, and it probably has something to do with this:

You saw the story Friday about Nicole Bogdas of the Orlando Sentinel. We hear she’s just the first of many who’ll be trimmed from various Tribune papers over the next week or two.

We’ve heard that up to half of all design and copy desk staffers at one Tribune paper, in particular, expects to be let go shortly.

The cuts are due, we’re told, to the Tribune’s new process of building formatted brodsheet pages in Chicago and then shipping them out for use in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore and so on. We have a copy of a briefing memo about this plan — which started weeks ago at some sites — but have been hoping for official comment from someone at Tribune.

I really wish that those pages would get no hits at all, that one day no one would need them (which, I guess, would happen eventually after newspapers have finally laid off everyone). I’ve done my share of Sam Zell bashing in the past, so there’s really no need to repeat it again. As for this particular round of layoffs, it saddens me to see the continuing trend of slashing design and copy desk staff. Even as a former newspaper designer and copy editor, I would be the first to admit — and recognized a few years ago — that my role (at least the design part of it) would be deemed more or less obsolete or expendable in a news organization of the future. Of course, newspapers 2009 aren’t news organizations of the future. They are just hacked up remains of the past. That’s part of what saddens me: If my former beloved craft is to fall by the wayside, I would like to know it came as part of moving on to something better. But these papers aren’t shedding design staff because they have made a big enough move to the Web that print design is no longer needed. They are shedding design staff just to stay afloat a little longer.

The other part of what saddens me is that it took so long for newspapers to embrace design and visuals as a key component of communication, and yet the craft of newspaper design is facing a rapid descent into oblivion. In 10 years, the craft would probably be good as dead. In 20 years, we might be talking about newspaper design in the same way we talk about Linotype machines and U-shaped copy desks.

As someone who has done print and Web design, I would say that as a designer, I get a much bigger kick out of designing information for print. There is something appealing about the art of organizing various pieces of information in a contained space in a way that balances aesthetics and comprehension. That’s what made me fall in love with those fantastic infographics in National Geographic, and it’s what drew me to newspaper design. You just don’t quite get that designing for the Web, which usually emphasizes the unbundling of those pieces of information and the use of the link.

As newspaper designer Jacet Utko puts it in this interview:

Newspapers, just before death — since we agree that, sooner or later, they will die — just before death, they blossom, design-wise. Never in history has design and visual journalism been as good as it is now. This happens not only in Western Europe and America, but even more in countries in Latin America. Asia is waking up; they will do beautiful stuff in the near future.

People perceive newspapers as boring pages with letters, but I can find so many examples around the world of sophisticated, artistic, beautiful work. They’re not dying because they’re not good. They’re dying because of more general reasons connected with technology and behavior.

Evolution is inevitable, but not all things lost in evolution were lost because they were bad.