"Collegiate Peaks" photographed along Highway 285, south of Buena Vista, Colorado by Kari Andresen

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A little over two months after getting laid off from the Missoulian, husband-and-wife reporting team Pam Podger and John Cramer have been doing OK, Podger said. I had called her for an update after I read her column in the American Journalism Review. In it, she described the tough moment she learned that both she and her husband would be out of work, immediately.

“Both of us?” I sputtered.

It was all I could say when the publisher of the Missoulian, the daily newspaper in Missoula, Montana, quietly told my husband and me that we were both being laid off, effective immediately. The publisher praised our performance and told us that the decision was based on seniority. No matter our combined 50 years of experience – we were the newest staff members.

The trivia question was, What Western family owned-and-operated business that started up in the late 1940s had the tag line, for a time, “Where one tree is cut, another is planted.” ?

All of the submissions guessed the same company- Weyerhaeuser, one of the largest timber companies in the world.