I just got a call from a Matthew Hendrickson, Columbia College student in Chicago, doing a paper for his journalism class on laid-off journalists who are blogging.

“How did you get my name,” I queried, “because I don’t disseminate or publicize my blog?”

“I just googled laid-off journalists and your name popped up,” he said.

What way to gain notoriety.

Matthew asked me what I’ve been doing since I’ve been laid off and why I started a blog.

I told him it was to express my frustration with being laid off and also my enthusiasm for the new opportunities I thought this part of my life was offering me. (Little did I know that eight months later I would have achieved zippo, zilch, nada. Oh well.)

Did I know, he asked, that a lot of laid-off journalists are also blogging for the same reasons?

I was not surprised, I said. What was I supposed say?

He seemed to have particular difficulty understanding why I wasn’t eager to continue a career in journalism. “I’ve done it for over 30 years,” I said, confident that would be explanation enough. Apparently it wasn’t. He came back to this point two or three more times and I had no other explanation but to repeat myself. What could I say? He’s probably 20 years old and full of fire. I could be his grandmother and I’m full of polenta.

He asked me if I thought that newspapers would somehow sort themselves out or that the Internet would replace them. I said no I didn’t think so. I preferred the solution offered by recent editorial in the New York Times that proposed newspapers be supported by endowments as are colleges and universities.

Furthermore, the sources of those endowments would make clear the leaning of the newspaper. Just as in Europe there are conservative, socialist and liberal newspapers, the source of endowments would identify the stripe of that newspaper. And it wouldn’t be GM or IBM.

But who in this economic disaster we are now in will come forward to endow a newspaper? Let alone a whole nation of newspapers?