People often talk about the decline of print journalism as an abstract given. Here's a very concrete way of looking at it over time:

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS—More than 40,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2009, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is nearly twice the 21,000 cut in 2008 and more than any single year in the past 10 years. Even with furloughs, salary cuts and numerous retirement fund freezes, publishers lopped off a tragic number of positions, even as they sought to expand online and, of course, increase workloads for those who remain. The count at the end of 2009 is 284,220 jobs. In 1999, that number was at 424,500. If things don't slow down, any attempt to properly cover news, and write and edit it, will be lost if it hasn't been already.

You can argue with that last sentence, certainly, but you can probably forgive the writer if you think his analysis of these numbers drifts into angry hyperbole.

His name is Joe Strupp, and he's the senior editor at the trade magazine for the print journalism business, Editor & Publisher—which announced earlier this month that it's closing after 125 years.