It started with a flashing question mark that appeared on her screen one day, and the next thing my coworker knew, her Mac wouldn’t turn on. She lost everything: word files, photographs, music and downloaded e-mails. The techies couldn’t save her hard drive and, unfortunately, she had never backed up her files. She wept at the Apple store and took her old hard drive home in a Ziploc.

 

Her story jolted me, as I could empathize with the sudden loss. And I couldn’t help but think about how we would conduct ourselves differently if we were forewarned about pending losses.

 

It’s a point that hits close to home at a time when our industry is experiencing tremendous change as a result of competition from the Internet, a declining economy and perhaps a decreased social appreciation for the printed word. Sadly, those changes of late are manifesting themselves in the form of cuts and closures. The Los Angeles Times recently announced yet another round of staff cuts, including 150 newsroom positions, on top of reductions announced in February. Similarly, other daily newspapers across the country have announced staff cuts this year.

 

Closer to home, despite its popularity and impressive production values, a fellow English-language ethnic magazine, Tu Ciudad, folded in June to the shock of many, including members of our staff who had become fans of the publication targeting U.S.-reared Latinos.

 

As I read eulogies for Tu Ciudad, I couldn’t help but think about how much this magazine held in common with KoreAm Journal. Both magazines mix(ed) celebrity with the serious, and struggle(d) to find the right balance of coverage that would appeal to bicultural Americans who might have varied interests and values, but still felt bound by their common ethnic and cultural identity.

 

“It was easy to dismiss Tu Ciudad as frivolous, but for some reason I saved every copy,” wrote L.A. Times staff writer Agustin Gurza, who covered the closure of Tu Ciudad. “It filled a void, so it felt important, even historic.”

 

When my friend, a Korean American, told me about Tu Ciudad going belly up, I detected a troubled urgency in her voice. She sounded slightly traumatized, and told me, in light of the bad news, she was so grateful KoreAm was still kicking.

Just a week after that phone conversation, KoreAm’s editor-in-chief James Ryu gave the staff some sobering news about our own company’s financial woes. Fortunately, no one was let go (yet), but significant cuts to salaries and budgets were announced. Last year, we suffered a 30-percent dip in advertising so, of course, there would be consequences. Still, the news felt surreal because, for the first time, I felt an urgency greater than ever before that we could lose this voice in our multicultural forest, just as Tu Ciudad was suddenly gone. Just as A Magazine, an Asian American monthly, had gone before that. And just as the English-language Korea Times Weekly had gone before that.