Last week, in discussing my serendipitous stop in Leadville, Colorado, a place where, I hypothesized, one could identify parallels between the rags to riches to rags saga of Baby Doe Tabor and the rise and fall of the newspapers, I alluded to my favorite fake Onion headline of all time. It’s a bogus Titanic front page with the banner hed “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg,” and a framed copy of it hangs in my studio bathroom.

Now that I’m back from my trip, I see that the news from the world of news once again conjures Titanic imagery, though this time the reason has less to do with the metaphorical world and more to do with simple mechanics: as in, what happens, exactly, when the hull of a ship is at 90 degrees and folks are being plunged into icy water. I haven’t been in any maritime disasters, thank goodness, but I know it’s not a big stretch to imagine a scenario in which people who should be pulling towards a common goal—like swimming towards a life raft—instead resort to and bickering, anger and self-preservation.

This weekend, a couple of postings on various journalism sites illustrated to me just how ugly things are getting in the land of newspapers, where layoffs are occurring with such ferocity that one can’t even keep track any longer. The Los Angeles Times one day, the Mercury News the next, and on and on. I’ve been trying to keep up with the news, always via Romenesko, journalism’s ground zero for insider news, though I admit that it’s becoming harder to separate one round of layoffs from another. Within these stories and blog postings, Titanic clichés run amok, with “rearranging the deck chairs” being an almost constant refrain. But there’s another metaphor that keeps popping and it conjures a different watery image: burning bridges.

Like everyone, I’ve always been led to believe that burning bridges is something to be avoided at all costs, a one-way ticket to, well, anywhere but from whence you just came. We keep out bridges intact, we’re told, so that we always have the prospect-- the potential-- of a job waiting for us somewhere else. What color is your parachute and all that jazz. (And if you're going to go out in a blaze of glory, at least be as creative as the Paris AOL office. On their final day after all being laid off, the office created one helluva music video. Watch it here--the password is "aollover.")

But two events this weekend have me scratching my head a little. In one case, a recently laid off designer at a once-grand newspaper was chastised for bridge burning because he had the audacity to flip the bird, literally and figuratively, at the paper that just fired him. And thousands of miles away, an intern at another large newspaper was being roasted over the coals and accused of bridge burning of another kind. Her crime? Blogging about her paper’s layoffs and defending—some would say brown-nosing-- the editor who announced them.

In the interests of disclosure, I don’t know either of these people, though I do know something about layoffs and creditors. I worked at United Press international during the late 1980’s, where downsizing was something of an art form. Serial numbers were changed on satellite equipment to inflate assets, promises of payments to vendors and freelancers were lies heaped on top of lies, and, most importantly, people seemed to disappear like they were in one of those air brushed Soviet propaganda pictures.

For the most part, people at competing news agencies were supportive, in part because they felt bad and in part because they no longer saw us as a viable threat. I worked in the L.A. bureau and our biggest concern back then was losing our camera position at the Oscars. But I’ll never the day I came back to my F3HP and 600mm lens in the first base photo box at Dodger Stadium. I had gone to get a Coke in between innings and when I returned, I found a photographer from a competing wire service looking closely at my lens and writing something down.

“Um, Doug, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Just copying down the serial numbers of this lens so I can bid on it at the auction after UPI goes out of business,” came the reply.

Wow. Nothing like the support of your fellow journalists, right?

That’s how I felt this weekend as I read about the firing of Martin Gee, a designer at the San Jose Mercury News. The Mercury News was once one of the crown jewels of the Knight Ridder chain.  Today, Knight Ridder doesn’t even exist, so it goes without saying that hard times have fallen on this particular paper and its employees.

Back in April, Gee posted a series of pictures that garnered him some attention in the media world, photos of a newspaper-turned-Old-West-ghost-town. Walking around the once-bustling newsroom, Gee took snapshots of what he saw: empty desks, computers piled upon one another, bulleting boards with no bulletins. These images were linked on sites like Gawker and Flickr, and they provide an eerie body of evidence to the dying newspaper business. If All the President's Men cemented the iconic image of a newsroom, abuzz with paper and activity, Gee's photos look more like something out of an M. Night Shyamalan film.

Last week, Gee finally caught up with many of his colleagues, though not in a way he probably wanted. While on vacation, he was laid off from the Mercury News. He added a few final parting images to his previous collection, including one of his middle finger giving a final salute to the Merc building, and added some captions that included some raw language.

I think Gee’s pictures are remarkably sad and compelling, something the Newseum should put on display instead of all those Bart Simpson-isms and silly 4-D movies, and I attribute the crudeness to the impersonality of the situation unfolding before him. Let’s not forget that frank language was once a revered staple of the news business, long before HR folks came onto the scene. (Mark Knopfler once sang, ‘Then came the churches, then came the schools/ then came the lawyers, then came the rules.” Today, he would have added the H.R. dopes.)

So I was less dismayed by Gee’s understandable parting shot than I was by a posting on Sportsshooter.com. In a discussion thread about the crumbling newspaper industry, someone brought up Mr. Gee’s firing, lamenting that the “newspaper’s loss will be some other industry’s gain.” As is always the case on the internet, someone immediately replied with the following:

“Mr. Gee is going to have a hard time getting hired by anybody familiar with his parting shots. Never burn bridges. Someday you may have to use them to retreat.”

Come again?!? It never ceases to amaze me how much support one gets from one’s colleagues on a message board. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, right? Should Mr. Gee have gone out as a lap dog, praising the wonderful job that MediaNews has done in destroying a great newspaper? And, more to the point, what happens when one burns a bridge in a forest and there’s no one left to hear? I wish Mr. Gee and all the employees of the Mercury News well--past and present-- and don’t begrudge him his middle finger at all. His photographs will one day be looked at as important artifacts of this sad age of printed newspapers.

I wish I could say the same for a certain intern at a large paper in Florida, a young woman who is alternately being hailed as the future of journalism and/or the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Bridge Burning.

Jessica DaSilva, who describes herself as “the lovely and talented Jessica DaSilva,” is an intern at the Tampa Tribune. On the blog she keeps to let the world know about her goings-on, DaSilva notes, with a hint of sarcasm, that she covers “small-scale politics and building maintenance” and laments that she keeps being given features to write, even though “those who know me know how much I can’t stand reading features.” She writes about her church goings and comings, how it’s inconceivable that one of her fellow journalism colleagues has no clips to show, and how her orientation at the Tribune wasn’t as “absolutely painful and pointless” as she was led to believe it would be. (She also has a tendency towards declarative statements, like this one in a post about the new Kit Kittredge movie:  “Like every little girl in this country, I grew up absolutely obsessed with American Girl dolls." Every girl? She counted?)

Like many young folks, DaSilva's a walking billboard for the Too Much Information Dep’t., something which could potentially harm her objectivity as a journalist down the line, and that’s exactly how she landed in hot water this past week. Hours after Tribune editor Janet Coats led a staff meeting detailing layoffs and a new business model for the paper, DaSilva blogged about the details of the meeting. Her account is filled with speculation (“The fact Janet made up her own crazy new business model for a newspaper without a prototype or any idea where it would take her was frightening to a lot of people”) and pronouncements probably beyond her pay grade (“A sports reporter in the Tallahassee bureau was layed off (sic) for no other reason other than the fact that it didn’t make sense to keep a full-time staff member there.") She also did a bit of nuzzling up to her editor, calling her “my hero,” ostensibly for seeing the difficult road ahead and for for making these difficult cuts.

DaSilva’s blog post is being dissected, line by line, in her own blog comments section and on other journalism sites. A lot of people are using it to illustrate the age gap that exists in newspapers, with young people loving blogs and the old newspaper fogies not having a clue. I think that's a bit over-reaching.  Many of the posts in her defense fall into one main category: Leave her alone, she’s an intern, she's young. But this defense has a gaping hole in it, in the form of a big question mark, one that has less to due with the future of newspapers and more to do with common courtesy: If she’s just an intern, what on earth led Ms. DaSilva to believe that she should be the chosen one to announce to the world the private details of her own paper’s staff meeting, one in which longtime employees were losing their jobs? It’s as if the bat boy for New York Yankees decided to blog about that night’s closed team meeting.

Ms. DaSilva obviously cares a lot about journalism, which is a good thing for sure. Her post about journalism and its future is titled, "It's Worth Fighting For," and I agree with her completely in that regard. But her musings on just what exactly can save journalism illustrate many of the things plaguing journalism. The instant analysis, like those bulletins from school shootings, often turns out to be wrong ("He used a Glock." "He used a shotgun." "He acted alone." "He had help."); the “confessional” blog format, in which what one ate for lunch becomes "news," just like those live California freeway chases on Fox; and the encroachment of less-than-salient personal tidbits into news accounts. (“Through most of this meeting” DaSilva writes, “I just wanted to shout, “Amen!” and “You go girl!” because Janet understands what’s up.”)

There’s that great scene in “Broadcast News,” the 1987 movie that used to be the definitive statement on downsizing in the news biz, long before this current trend. In it, the vacuous anchor, played by William Hurt, goes off his teleprompter, telling viewers (and I’m paraphrasing here) that an incident involving U.S. fighter planes has been resolved and that "we'll all be alright.” To which the network exec in the booth replies, “Who cares what you think?” Maybe that's the divide right there: with regard to personal information, one generation of journalists believes less is more and the other believes more isn't enough.

Jessica DaSilva has lots of energy for a budding reporter and I hope she succeeds. But I would argue that there are some things that trump that energy, like anointing oneself, while still an intern, as the town crier and discussing, in depth, the details of one's colleague's layoffs in the interests of a good blog post. To me, that's gauche.