In the last two days, we told you about layoffs at Forbes.com, Essence, Entertainment Weekly, and National Geographic, with a bonus false alert at Nylon thrown in for good measure. And the sad fact is that these are just the ones we could get around to doing. All these media layoffs are like a band-aid being pulled off verrrrryyyy slowly, and—unfortunately for the laid-off—each progressive wave of cuts makes us want to tune out the pain even more. This is the saddest thing of all. When good people get laid off they deserve to elicit some shock; they deserve to be remembered, and talked about, and reminisced upon. They deserve for the people who cover their demise to go into detail about who they were, and what they've done in their careers, and the big stories they broke, and how they changed things, and who they knew, and where they might go from here. They deserve commenters to bemoan their departure and joke about their good lines and reassure them that they'll be missed. But we have to face reality here: it ain't gonna happen. The media now is like a city with a high murder rate, where people get shot dead with such mind-numbing regularity that it gets harder and harder to summon the appropriate amount of outrage for their doom. We all still imagine that when our time comes, there will be a collective pause amongst our peers, and everyone will silently cross themselves and wonder how it could happen to such a talented person. But realistically, we'll be just another number. The best you can do now is say your little blanket agnostic prayer at night for all these assorted victims, then keep your head down and hope that you can ride out the downturn until good days come back again. On that note, here's some more layoff news we didn't get to today:

[Sad pic via]