The reporter sitting next to me got the news at a meeting: She had been laid off.

She slammed shut her empty file drawer. She quickly said goodbye. The bad economy ushered another one of journalism's finest out the door.

Thousands of us have witnessed or experienced the same story in the past two years. This one, though, took place in 1982 at the newly merged Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Several other colleagues left the Star Tribune that month. All of our lives and careers changed. But they weren't over.

More than 25 years of watching the ups and downs of the news business has given me, a former reporter and editor, the long view. I was one of the lucky ones who kept her job during the 1980s downturn. Over the next two decades, my ability to relocate and reimagine my job helped me find new, more promising jobs during every recession that followed.

Today I console my job-hunting friends: If you were recently laid off or are worried that you will be the next to slam shut that empty drawer, I want you to know that your next job is just around the corner. And the very skills that got you into a newsroom are going to help you thrive outside of it.

I left my job as editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wis., about five months ago. It took my husband's diagnosis of brain cancer to drag me out of there.

I miss the newsroom. I miss the traditions. I miss the mission. But I am using all of my journalism skills and having a lot of fun in my new job as the director of development at the 44,000-student Madison Area Technical College.

In the past five months many former newsies and other talented people -- who in previous eras would have gotten traditional journalism jobs -- have helped me understand that there are still many skills I can learn in my quest of truth-telling and community-building. And I may even be able to do it better in higher education.

One of my advisers is my 23-year-old daughter. Kaitlin Foley is an online community leader (aka blogger) for a joint effort of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio's "Here on Earth" program. She writes about Islam. Her academic colleagues and her radio mentors aim to ease tensions between Muslim culture and the rest of the world by sharing information via radio programming, research and the blog. Not a bad mission.

Kait has a part-time appointment. She lives from grant to grant. Her passion about the blog outdistances any fears about her job security. She is not all that different from her mother in 1982, who tamped down her horror at the layoffs in Minneapolis with the instinct to just keep slugging.

During the past 25 years, I've seen many talented people move seamlessly to jobs in education, government and public relations. Now I am watching another generation leave the news business or simply circumvent it. One similarity between the two generations is that both groups structure their work around values that some think exist only in newsrooms.

For me, a job that involved truth-telling and community-building was a must after I left the newsroom. I happened to be in the right place at the right time when the community college was hiring. Many laid-off journalists may not be as lucky.

Last month I eavesdropped on a recent Poynter live chat that taught those looking for work how to make their own luck. Experts traded advice with out-of-work reporters and editors and nailed what I recently have realized is the key to a successful job change: Build your new work life around the values you most cherished about your life in journalism.

This isn't easy, particularly when you are experienced and need a certain income to save for the retirement that may be racing toward you. You will likely miss perks, such as the social learning in your old cafeteria and a supply cabinet filled with pens that work.

You will give up important comforts. The hardest for me was letting go of my reputation built on 32 years of journalistic integrity and rebuilding one based on my worth to my new workplace.

Yet you will receive many new benefits: You will discover that the rest of the world really does value your ability to analyze and organize complex ideas. You will surprise yourself and others with your ability to communicate clearly via e-mail announcements, essays and op-eds, all of which will help the less fortunate get resources, education, health care or understanding. You will be reminded of the newsroom when your new employers meet you at a coffee shop, where the people around you have laptops and lattes rather than PCs and mugs. In short, you will go back to your earliest days in the newsroom when living by your wits was exhilarating and the future had no limits.

I almost feel a bit guilty that I am having so much fun learning this new world.

Other industries are not waiting with open arms to hire out-of-work journalists. We can't walk out of the newsroom and be surprised that we don't have five job offers. We journalists aren't special in the workforce unless we explain to people why we are special. We all have to make our own opportunities.

That's particularly true if we want to stay in the towns where we are currently living, where five, 20 or 90 people with your skill sets have been laid off. Like everywhere else, jobs are harder to come by in Madison. But I constantly hear of little crevices of work that someone less tied to a retirement plan could turn into a business plan.

I am optimistic about work opportunities for others who are trained to tell the truth and build the community through journalism. I see a rough patch in front of us. Most of us, including myself, are going to take pay cuts. We are going to have to get entrepreneurial. We will have to embrace new technologies that are changing the very way our culture organizes itself.

My daughter got as close to a newsroom job as her mother's incessant, foghorn-like warnings would allow. I admit I'm concerned about her ability to support herself in the years to come. I'm also quietly thrilled that she is now teaching me about new ways of doing business.

As I wrote this, I came across an intriguing video about a MIT project called the "Sixth Sense," featured at a conference called TED. Kait was downstairs at our house working on her laptop. I was upstairs emailing her.

"Read this," I e-mailed, with a link. Subject line: "cool." This is mom-speak for "I know just as much about technology as you do, tweet teacher."

She shot back: "I've written about TED on both of my blogs, is anyone reading????"

I gotta go. I have a lot of catching up to do. My next job may depend on it.