Winter and spring of 2009 upended two Sacramento journalists. Just ask Sena Christian, 28, and Walter Yost, 61.

The employers of both working reporters fired them this year. Christian covered the environment. Yost’s beat was education.

Their unemployment is part of a newsroom trend across the country. Layoffs in journalism rose at a rate of 22 percent per month in the one-year period which ended this August, reports Unity: Journalists of Color, Inc., “a strategic alliance advocating fair and accurate news coverage about people of color, and aggressively challenging the industry to staff its organizations at all levels to reflect the nation’s diversity.”

That downsizing of journalists compares with an economy-wide job-loss rate of 8 percent a month for the same 12 months. Further, according to the U.S. Labor Department, layoffs for news analysts, reporters and correspondents doubled between second-quarter 2008 and second-quarter 2009.

Christian, a former full-time reporter for 18 months at the weekly Sacramento News & Review, owned by Chico Community Publishing, Inc., was “not completely shocked” at her in-person firing by Editor Melinda Welsh in February.

“I knew that the paper like all papers was struggling,” Christian said.

Rapid technological change and a housing crash are driving down revenues for newspapers. The popularity of digital media is attracting paid readership from print media. At the same time, the bursting of the housing bubble has wiped out wealth and buying power for businesses and households, according to Dean Baker, author, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.

Yost, a full-time Sacramento Bee reporter for 16 and a half years, got a phone call from the paper’s editor, Melanie Sill, about his March layoff.

“It didn’t totally surprise me,” he said, noting his job loss was one of 128 Bee-wide. The paper’s newsroom accounted for 29 job cuts.

“These layoffs followed-up our labor contract negotiations with the McClatchy Company (which owns The Bee and 29 other daily newspapers),” said Yost. "I had sat at the bargaining table as vice chair of the Newspaper Guild, Local 39521, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. We had been forewarned that there would be serious cutbacks. Frankly, all of us were startled at how big it was.”

Labor union rights and wrongs at the workplace were not factors in Christian’s layoff. SN&R is a non-union employer. The work force, company employees and freelance contributors, labors at-will.

This means employment is for no defined length of time. Further, the employer and employee are legally free to end their labor arrangement at any time for any reason.

Currently, Christian and Yost receive state unemployment insurance. Christian gets a $700 UI check every two weeks and is on her first six-month extension of jobless benefits.

Yost receives every two-week UI checks of $750. The beginning of his first six-month extension of UI benefits draws near.

Currently, Christian is pursuing journalism as a freelancer for the SN&R and other news outlets. It’s a challenge to make ends meet, she said. Her pay is about 80 percent less as an SN&R freelancer than as a full-time reporter, with no employer-provided health-care insurance. She pays for that coverage now.

“That’s a little hard to swallow,” Christian said. “What I’m making is not enough to pay even half of my rent now.”

She freelanced for 6 months at the paper before landing a full-time slot.

Out of necessity, she has branched out as a freelance journalist. Her work appeared in the Missoula Independent and Monterey County Weekly recently.

Yost has not been reporting since his layoff from The Bee. It’s not for a lack of trying. He has been looking for new journalism employment.

However, “those jobs are just not out there” Yost said. “A representative at a major newspaper laughed in my face when I asked about openings for reporter jobs now or in the future.”

Meanwhile, Yost is active with the Northern California Media Workers Guild of The Sacramento Bee. He is a non-voting staff person involved in bargaining talks with the McClatchy Co. for a new labor contract. “It might be the most important contract for Guild members at The Bee since the 1970s,” Yost said. The union’s negotiations with the company begin Nov. 2.

Speaking of important things for reporters and readers, Christian is concerned about the effects of a worsening economy on the profession of journalism.

“Publications are getting more desperate to survive, and that might lead to the break-down of the wall between editorial and sales," she said. "This is a conflict of interest that really disturbs me.”

In theory, this “wall” separates a news outlet’s main sources of revenue (such as advertisers) from shaping editorial output, or what reporters write. Therefore, a journalist is free, say, to cover a company’s business practices even if it buys ad space in the same publication.

What actually happens in practice in newsrooms? The answers are subject to debate.

In their 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman present case studies of news reporting and develop an alternate theory of press censorship.

They argue that there are filters that news must pass through to be newsworthy. One filter is a publication’s advertisers. Crucially, ad revenues fund a news firm’s daily operations, i.e., salaries, supplies, etc.

For Yost, Bee journalist layoffs bode ill for the paper’s role as a daily watchdog in the public’s interest.

“The loss to the Sacramento community and beyond is that there are fewer reporters covering corruption in state and local governments," Yost said. "This is not a left or right thing.”

According to a spring essay by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney in The Nation on the crisis in U.S. journalism, if a press watchful of power and wealth is neither a conservative or liberal issue, perhaps it is time to view journalism as a public utility.

That viewpoint assumes, of course, that a political democracy such as the U.S. requires a free press to inform its citizens for reasons of open government. Therefore, with journalism in a kind of death-spiral today, the role of the press is too vital to American democracy to remain a private asset, the essay states.

Back in Sacramento, Christian and Yost, down but not out, are surviving a severe print media shake-out. As the owners of the industry strive to create profitable ways to produce, distribute and consume news, nothing suggests that this process is nearing an end. Christian and Yost’s lives after their newspaper layoffs are proof of that.

One thing is clear. They are not alone.