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In the long-ago summer afternoons of 1982, as I walked down Eighth Street to start my night copy desk shift at The Des Moines Register, sometimes I would meet Bob Kolarik, headed home from his job at the Tribune.

“I hear you’re on the list,” he would say, pretending to be concerned. “Really?” I would say. “I heard you are.”

Well, it helped pass the summer. We were talking about the secret list of employees to be laid off when the Tribune shut down, and it wasn’t much fun waiting a few months for the ax to fall.

I survived the massacre, but Kolarik didn’t. He went off to a career at the San Antonio Express-News, and I never saw him again.

So I have all kinds of sympathy for the people who were laid off this month by the Register, and here’s hoping that they all go on to fine careers, too.

When I talked to Register Publisher and President Laura Hollings-worth recently, though, she said something surprising. She said she hopes the staff will grow again after the economy turns around. She said, “I hope to have a lot of these folks back some day.”

That seems unlikely. Daily newspapers are not exactly looking like a growth industry these days. Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection, Lee Enterprises Inc. is scrambling to avoid the same fate, the two big papers in Detroit are cutting home delivery to three days a week and Gannett Co. Inc., owner of the Register, announced that more job cuts are expected in 2009.

It’s not surprising that the Register has to share in the general economic misery. Unfortunately, its employees can’t console themselves with the kinds of luxurious benefits enjoyed by, say, the United Auto Workers. The Newspaper Guild took a shot at the Register newsroom at least once that I know of but didn’t get in. So, before they were laid off, the reporters were expected to put in as much time as it took to get the job done, and there was no overtime pay. Today, they’re not at a union hall collecting checks.

The newsroom grunts of years past didn’t complain about the lack of a union. They did complain about the pressure to cut costs while publishers like Gannett racked up huge profit margins, probably in the 30 percent range.

As former Register publisher Charlie Edwards said after Gannett bought out the Cowles family, “If my great-grandfather had known newspapers could make this much money, he never would have died.”

However, it’s hard to know how any particular paper is doing. A Web site devoted to blogging about Gannett was filled with excitement recently when somebody dredged up some paper-by-paper financial figures for the chain.

The numbers are poorly defined, but suggest that the Register had a 24.6 percent profit margin through the first three quarters of 2007. Whether that’s correct, Hollingsworth wouldn’t say.

“Nobody goes to the grocery store and asks about the profit margin on each individual product,” she said. More important, she said, the economy has changed so drastically this year that past numbers simply aren’t relevant.

True, but the worker bees can’t help thinking about everything that led to this point. Young journalists learn that the first duty of a newspaper is to make a profit. If they’re on the news side, they figure the profit is what allows you to carry out the real purpose of a newspaper – producing the kind of journalism that makes a community better. When they hear about extraordinary profits, their first thought is not to mail the excess money to the executives.

Fat profits are not a factor now, Hollingsworth said. “Profit margins have been significantly reduced in the last year and the last months,” she said. “That said, most papers are profitable. My job is to get us positioned for when the economy comes around.”

It’s a tough job, but at least she still has one.