John Oliver’s tribute and rant about newspapers and journalism is brilliant.

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, including a fake preview of a movie called “Stoplight” at the end of the bit that contains a huge amount of truth about the state of journalism.

Welcome to my life.

Three months ago, the family-owned, independent newspaper I worked for nearly my entire career was sold to a media group. There had already been changes and cuts. The last three years were a roller coaster at The Elkhart Truth, though many of us had gotten on the ride a long time before that. We just didn’t feel the shakes and turns on a daily basis as we had more recently.

More than a decade ago, a publisher had stood before us and told us that we’d someday be livestreaming city council meetings and doing something other than writing stories.

As print journalists, we didn’t believe him.

We were still getting annual raises and worked for an organization that had a monopoly on the publish button. We contributed to a paper that was delivered in the afternoon most days and then every morning.

We would tell the television journalists we ran into at press conferences that they couldn’t put what they did in a scrapbook. They’ll tell us that we couldn’t make our stories move and talk.

What we didn’t know is that this thing called the internet would change all that.

For more than 20 years, I went to work in an old building that smells of newsprint and ink, though the paper stopped being printed there a handful of years ago.

I was an early adopter of Twitter and demanded that I use my own Mac laptop rather than the slower desktop model they issued me. When I became an editor, perhaps in part because of those things, my job was trying to figure out this thing called the internet and how to put our newsroom’s work online.

I wasn’t a prodigy at it. I was another Gen X journalist trying to figure out how to change. I did change and got some of the reporters who worked for us to as well. It didn’t happen soon enough, but we eventually got journalists to stop saying, “I just want to be a print reporter.”

Some became personally adept at using Twitter or Facebook. Others learned how to shoot and edit video. Meanwhile, whatever was going online was being given away.

Newspaper owners didn’t realize for too long that the readership was moving and changing from print to online. Even if the owners did, they didn’t know how the ad dollars would follow. As Oliver said, it’s like finding a lucky penny while a teenage hacker drains your bank account.

I wish that someone in journalism would have landed on the model that Spotify uses for music or Texture uses for magazines. I wish that somehow it would be cheaper to receive a newspaper for a month than to watch as many hours as you wish on Netflix. I often said there are now far more efficient ways for us to get you information than to bring a pile of dead trees to your house every morning, but we’ll keep doing it as long as we can.

Newspapers, even small ones, used to practically be factories to print money. In the early 1990s when I started, they were extremely profitable. Those days are gone. The last few years, it’s been hard to make a buck.

The newspaper itself still has tremendous value. People of all generations value when a respected newspaper does a story, publishes a picture, or does a video on something to which they’re connected. The validation a newspaper brings still has value. As Oliver said, they play a huge role in the food chain and do so much to help communities, as well as be a source for other media.

Owners and publishers looked at how to make changes to get where the audience already was. Sometimes they launched initiatives to get digital marketing dollars or put resources online. I sat in meeting after meeting and helped make decisions about how to do that at a small, Midwestern news organization that was one of the few standalone, family-owned papers left.

On May 1, it became part of a chain called Paxton Media Group. Within days, where the paper was printed, how it looked, and who was there to keep producing the paper all changed. I was one of the people shown the door with a severance that could have been more generous, but wasn’t nothing.

The new company has yet to inspire hope and confidence in its readers. A number of people left on their own to work elsewhere or just not to be there. Given what’s transpired, I’m glad that the new company didn’t keep me.

The action, or inaction as the case may be, most upsetting is how Paxton Media Group didn’t import the archive of elkharttruth.com stories from the last 15 years when it switched content management systems.

For several weeks now, links to anything from the past are broken. That’s thousands of stories, obituaries and photos, not to mention innovative digital journalism. Thousands of links to great work and the daily journalism that told of the life of a community. And they may be just gone because a new company coming into a community didn’t bother to put them online.

Perhaps Paxton plans to, but there’s no indication so far. Though most small to mid-sized newspapers haven’t spent the money to transfer years of microfiche to digital, throwing away 15 years of online content is horrible for the journalists who did that work and for the community who relied on it.

It’s work that won awards. It’s work that gained acclaim. In a world that relies on Google and being able to find past online content, to discard the online work of a newspaper you just purchased makes no sense if you have the best interests of a community at heart.

The last few years, people started asking me, with their head cocked as if they were asking about a dying relative, “How’s the newspaper business?”

I always said, “It’s a great time to write for a newspaper. The audience has never been bigger. It’s just not a great time to be in the newspaper business.”

The state of journalism isn’t bad. Great work is being done at small and large papers. Reporters and others in the industry are innovating and finding new ways to connect with readers and to tell stories.

The tools are better than ever. The audience reads and watches good work. People talk about and share work to which they connect.

Economics may mean that new owners who don’t know the community make decisions based on numbers, not what a community is, has been or needs. More than anything, the economics mean smaller newsrooms and that’s not good for journalism or the community. Journalists still in newsrooms can work smarter and even harder, but when there are so many fewer of them, the net result isn’t good for them or the community.

Joel Mathis, who has done a syndicated column I loved posting every week, said he decided to pay for a subscription to the Lawrence Journal-World after moving back to Kansas. He wasn’t going to, but after watching Oliver’s piece, he wanted to pay for local journalism. That’s what Oliver is calling people to do.

After being let go, I’ve been fortunate to be able to continue writing and get paid to do it as a freelancer. A food column I write appears in two other local newspapers and a food website the company that sold the paper still owns. My years as a community journalist meant that I had an audience who wanted to keep reading me and people who, so far, have been willing to pay me a little to keep that happening.

I’m struggling with how to become a consumer of local news. For years, I gathered news, brokered to get off-the-record to become part of the record, and generally knew the news of the day before others.

Even as a freelancer, I’m mostly on the outside and have to rely on a variety of local news sources rather than the one where I worked. A digital subscription to the New York Times and National Public Radio both keep me informed on national news. There are dozens of other sites that could also do it for free to me as a reader. But locally it’s a different challenge and I sadly took down the plastic delivery box affixed to my mailbox and, at least for now, am a digital reader.

Because of the internet, it’s easy to tell stories or to read them. They can be shared readily. At some point, we started calling stories “content” because it was a larger catch-all for all the stuff we were producing. But at its heart, it’s still stories. And stories rule the world. How journalists tell them is changing, just as journalism companies are changing. They’re all figuring out how to get paid for doing what they do.

Television news is undergoing some of the same challenges the print news industry has. Newsrooms are getting smaller. The number of watchdogs in our communities is declining and that means that the crooks, the ones with power who aren’t ethical, will have an easier time getting away with it.

But aside from that, the storytelling on a community is less commonplace and as good as the stories are on Netflix, they won’t help you understand where you live and what’s happening there. That’s what journalists do. And when fewer of them are getting paid to do that work in a community, it’s not good for anyone. Except the crooks.