From WNYKRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Media land is drowning in red ink.

Like that's new.

NPR just let go 7% of its workforce, canceling the program's day-to-day in news and notes.

The New York Times announced plans to borrow a quarter of a billion dollars against

its building. The Tribune Company, owners of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the

Baltimore Sun declared bankruptcy. We could do this every week. All over the country,

at papers large and small budgets have been slashed.

Journalists have lost their jobs.

The avalanche of pink slips has writer Mark Pinsky thinking about the last Great Depression

when thousands of wordsmiths were put to work on the Federal Writers Project.

Created in 1935 as part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, the

Writers Project, at least in Penske's view, is ripe for resurrection.

There are so many unemployed, displaced media workers that I think there's a place for

people like us in the economic stimulus program. If President-elect Obama is going to reach back

to the Works Progress Administration, the WPA from the 1930s, as a model or a partial model

for his economic stimulus program, he might look to a component called the Federal Writers

Project.

So compare and contrast the original Federal Writers Program with the one that you propose.

I guess I would call mine Federal Writers Project Light.

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