There is never a good time to announce job losses. No matter what the time of year it'll be someone's birthday, someone's child's birthday, approaching Christmas, approaching the Summer holidays or monthly mortgage payment time.
This week, 14 of our friends and colleagues at the 'Journal' were informed that their jobs are likely to go.
The official announcement stated that the Journal's owners, Johnston Press, are proposing to centralise their operations in the North. Som
e, but not all, of the jobs are being relocated to Carn in Armagh.
It's bad news for Derry and bad news for those affected directly and indirectly.
It is also a sign of the times and not the beginning of the end for the 'Journal', as some doom-mongers are predicting.
Media commentator Roy Greenslade, speaking on BBC Radio Foyle, said JP's move to centralise operations was symptomatic of what was happening in newspapers generally in Britain and Ireland at a time of very difficult trading conditions.
There was a stunned silence in the office on Monday morning when word spread and, before long, half the town had an opinion.
Rumours spread like wildfire and rows of "experts" lined up to share their thoughts about the fate of the paper.
Hysterical theories including 'The death of the Derry Journal' and 'Buncrana Road site sold to Iceland' were bandied about.
There was a lot of chat about the goings-on and concerned phonecalls aplenty.
A lot of that concern was genuine. In other cases, it was 'mock-concern', used as a cover for people to have a go at the 'Journal' and its staff.
On a local radio station, a talkshow began discussing the job losses. Unfortunately, that discussion deteriorated quickly into a phone-in session during which people rang in to slag off the paper. Some listeners had made up their mind that the job losses were a direct result of falling standards at the 'Journal'. They claimed that sales have dropped massively and that the production jobs have gone thanks to the poor performance of the editorial staff. That is simply not the case.
Astonishingly, people started ranting about the lack of news in the paper and how it had gone downhill in recent years. There is nothing whingers like more than to grope around for rose-tinted specs at the first opportunity. But maybe they have a point. Ever since that pesky Good Friday agreement paved the way for peace on our streets there have been fewer horror stories to report.
When I was at primary school, breakfast was accompanied by BBC news on the television every morning. My cornflakes and milk had a backing-track of bombs, murder and massacre. These days, pupils at Trench Road are bombarded with stories relating to house prices when munching their cereal. If it's local news I'm watching, I'll take the tamer headline relating to mortgage crises every time.
People have suggested that the jobs have gone because of some sort of crisis at the 'Journal' and that the losses are a sign of things to come - a death knell for the newspaper.
They aren't. It's lousy and disappointing that people have lost their jobs.
