Another victim of the financial collapse

It's really a shocker to find media outlets going down the toilet. Especially when they fire out these Pulitzer type essays......

See the tall, gregarious young man in the Eighteenth Street Lounge, moving easily toward a group of receptive women as the floor vibrates with reggae music? He's dressed in a sharp Hugo Boss suit, and he knows that the minimum for a table is $240.

But he's not offering to buy the drinks. And the suit? He bought it a year ago, when he had a six-figure salary.

Dating in the time of the pink slip means feeling the squeeze of the drastically reduced paycheck, the sudden sting of the layoff. From investment bankers to real estate developers to construction workers, no job means no buying rounds of $15 martinis for a pretty woman and her girlfriends. No hosting parties in the bachelor loft. And often, no idea how to present one's new self on the dating market.

"It's been incredibly stressful for me," said Neil Welsh, 27, the guy in the suit, who until last year was marketing director for a booming real estate company. "I was so used to using my financial situation to leverage my dating."

For many affected by the recession, dating is the least of their worries. But the market crash has had a particular impact on young adults who developed their dating skills in fat times, the twentysomethings who spent lavishly to show that they could afford the finer things. Now, with national unemployment rates at 8.8 percent for people 25 to 34, they are looking for more creative ways to attract partners -- and reassessing what all that big spending really meant.

Are you kidding me? This guy has to change his getting laid game plan and that's worthy of a newspaper article?

Once again, I'm still waiting for a newspaper profile of someone who I actually sympathize with.

And, once again, I'm still waiting for a reason to think that all newspaper shouldn't go by the way side.

more here if you can keep your lunch down....