For more than three decades, Bill Sloat was a newspaperman. Then one day, quite suddenly, he wasn't. That was the day, not long ago, that Sloat got the offer, a buyout package from The Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Since 1985, Sloat had been a one-man bureau in Cincinnati, and he loved the work of being a reporter. Recalls Sloat: “I had the best job in Ohio.”

But the Plain Dealer's offer was too good to refuse, and Sloat took it, along with 63 other newsroom personnel.

As a rough guess, there's 1,000 Bill Sloats out there, maybe even more. These are the newspaper people, men and women, who in just the last year or so have either accepted buyout packages or been handed pink slips.

Newspaper layoffs are hardly new. This is new.

The cutbacks are part of the massive restructuring now going on in the American newspaper industry as publishers struggle to cope with dramatic slides in circulation as readers move over to the internet.

It's an ugly struggle, and it's no sure bet they can pull it off without lots more hemorrhaging. For sure, thousands more will be let go before the industry finds its rightful equilibrium.

“So much of the talent is being squeezed out by the economy,” Sloat says. “The business has really changed in the last 18 months. I don’t think people in the newspaper business realize how much it’s changing.”

One cost, potentially a huge one, is the loss of the years of knowledge and intelligence Bill Sloat and other experienced reporters have brought to their work. It can mean getting the story right when getting it right really matters. It can mean keeping phony stories and wrong stories out of the paper. Those years of experience represent institutional memory, which, once lost, can never be recovered.

In recent decades, led by the likes of The Washington Post and The New York Times, American newspapers have aspired to become smarter, better publications, more honest and thorough, and fairer. The risk is that with these cutbacks, the slide down will begin, and it will go far quicker, not over decades but a few short years.

The cutbacks are everywhere. In recent weeks, The Washington Post announced plans to shrink its news operation, meaning more buyouts, and the word out of Philadelphia is that as many as 150 newsroom people will lose their jobs at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News. The St. Paul Pioneer Press is slashing the equivalent of 40 full-time jobs, with half the reductions coming from the newsroom. And at the embattled Los Angeles Times, some 100 additional news jobs are expected to be cut.

Few of these people will stay in newspapers. Many are leaving the field entirely, many going back to school to find their new careers. Others are looking for work in related fields.

Sloat admits that he is one of the lucky ones. “Our buyout was extremely generous,” he says. “It has allowed me to fall back and regroup. I’ve gone back to school and I am planning on publishing a newsletter and a blog. I’m going to be in the information business, which is more valuable than ever.”

Kathy Thatcher is one of 111 Dallas Morning News employees who decided to take the recent buyout offer.

“I’m interviewing for editing and public relations jobs – with regular hours and less stress,” says Thatcher, after more than a decade at the Dallas paper, most recently as an assistant business editor.

“Only one opportunity is with a publication, and it’s a trade magazine. I have two elementary-school children and a husband who won’t leave Dallas, so I’m out of the newspaper business, probably for good.”

She says others who took buyouts are going back to school to pursue master’s degrees or are retiring. One went to work for the Associated Press.

Overall, among takers of buyouts, there's a sense that the good years are past for newspaper work, and the time is right to leave, as painful as it may be.

“Surprisingly, I find myself quite energized these days as I prepare to leave the newspaper biz, which has been the love of my life,” Sloat says. “It was great. It’s sad as hell that it’s over.”