Series aims to help you cope, succeed in economic crisis

It is an understatement in today's economy for a newspaper to say we feel your pain. It's also immaterial.

Combined with changing reader habits, the recession or depression or whatever you want to call it of 2008 is hitting newspapers hard. People don't have money to spend. They don't buy houses, cars and other retail goods. Fewer businesses have money to advertise. Newspapers don't have the resources to do all the things they've become accustomed to doing.

It's not all that different from what you may be experiencing in this financial climate. But, also like you, we do soldier on, striving to keep our focus on our most important functions - one of which is to chronicle how this economy affects you. It's hard to imagine that the economic crash of 2008 will surpass the terrorism of 9/11 as the story of the decade, but to many suburbanites living through it now, it must feel close to that point.

With that awareness in mind, we began last Sunday an occasional series aiming to put a human face on all the numbers and government reports and to provide practical ideas to help us all make it through the crisis.

In Sunday's installment, Joe Martinez described with the eloquence of personal experience the hardships his father had to overcome as a Mexican immigrant working for 40 years to build a successful business only to find his dreams and accomplishments threatened by the tight credit market.

It is one thing to read an analysis of the banking industry's woes and understand that tight credit will lead to business failures. It is something even more affecting to see an object lesson that demonstrates how that plays out in the life of an individual and family, to realize that what's happening for the Martinezes is happening hundreds of times over across the suburbs and the country.

We can't tell each of those hundreds of stories, of course, but we can and will share some. We will focus attention on individuals and families coping with hardships both expected and unexpected in difficult financial times. We will find strategies not just for coping emotionally, but for succeeding financially. We'll help you avoid scams and steer you toward the solutions that address the particular needs of your personal or family situation.

For many of us, economics is an arcane science, a topic we're happy to leave to the business pages and that peculiar portion of the population that really enjoys them. But, like chemistry or physics or biology or psychology or any of scores of other sciences, the rules of economics eventually affect us all in material ways. It's important that we examine these effects now and extend the stories to the health and sports and front pages.

To some extent, this is just a matter of sharing. It helps us all to know that others are experiencing some of the same things we are. Just as important, it is also a matter of growing - finding strategies that help us survive in the short term, protect us against something like this happening again and prepare us for dealing with it if it does.

Our series is called "Our uncertain times." It's being directed by Lisa Miner, one of our key enterprise editors, but will likely eventually involve everyone on our staff in some way. Research is under way for stories that will continue this week, through the end of this year and beyond. As they touch you, or as you see ideas or developments that deserve to be explored, let Lisa or one of us know.

As a newspaper, we will have a special empathy for many of these stories because we are experiencing them, too. But ultimately, our aim is to be your resource for understanding your community and your age - and that aim applies in good times and in bad.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.