Youngstown, Ohio, Lost Its Only Paper. A 'Zombie' News Site Wants To Fill The Void
If you told Brian Dzenis three years ago he would be loading postal semis for work, he would have laughed in your face. A former sports reporter at the now-defunct Youngstown Vindicator, affectionately known as the Vindy, Dzenis, 31, has spent the time after his layoff as a second-shift loader for FedEx, and an expediter for the United States Postal Service.
Instead of covering D-1 varsity at Chaney High, Dzenis now wakes at 6 a.m. to process packages at a facility in Warrendale, Penn. He makes roughly $5,000 more a year than he did during his three years at the Vindy, and Dzenis says he has no concrete plans to return to journalism.
"It's not like I'm totally a shell of my former self," Dzenis says. "Still, I don't know that the things I do at the postal service will give me the same kind of satisfaction as I had as a journalist."
His internal crisis about his journalism future mirrors, in many ways, the predicament that has befallen American journalism as a whole. As the COVID-19 pandemic
