Regional Press Crisis: A reporter's view

I contacted a young reporter on a daily regional who is clued in about the web and social media and loves working in news. She is now so disillusioned she has applied for a PR job.
She told me: "Personally, I have no faith that management can get us out of this. It feels as though they’re flailing around trying to protect their bottom line without any thought to where that will leave the business.
"We can take our seven per cent pay cut and watch them make more of the wrong people redundant but we all know it won’t be enough.
"If our editor had come to us and said ‘we’re restructuring the business, these are the products we want to produce, this is how many people we need to produce them, this is our strategy for growing the audience, this is the standard we expect, this is what our newspaper stands for’ we could accept that the cuts had a purpose.
"But we seem to have no strategy. None of the groups are honest with the staff about why cuts are necessary, or who they’ll benefit. We all know we’re expendable if it’ll keep the share price up. They centralise subbing, proving they have no idea about how to create a good newspaper. They can’t agree about social media. They have no idea who their audience should be or how to reach them. They ghettoise web teams. Advertising staff are chasing their tails trying to persuade companies who got their web ads for free last year that this year they’re worth paying for – while at the same time having to heavily discount paper ads because of the recession. "There’s no joined-up thinking about how to make the web pay. Are these problems fixable? Yes, but only by people who have vision and enthusiasm. We don’t have that. We have (mostly) scared middle-aged men who are out of their depth and trying to maintain the status quo.
"I love the news industry. Journalism is all I ever wanted to do. But today I applied for a PR job because I don’t believe the news business today has a career for me. Can I aspire to being an editor one day? Not any more. My dream job doesn’t exist anymore.
"The papers are all closed or merged or subbed off site. So what are the choices? Hope you don’t get made redundant before a job comes up at a company that has got it right. Take your ideas and set up by yourself. Or leave a job you love because you can’t bear to see it devalued any more."