We’re just back from a week in Las Vegas, where we headed to enjoy sunny days, desert hiking and the wonderful strangeness of life on the Strip.

One thing that especially struck me while we were there was the fact that everyone in Vegas is happy, in a way that everybody in Oregon, isn’t.

People aren’t constantly whining about the economy. People aren’t hunched over from the weather. They’re relaxed and smiling and having a good time, even the waiters and waitresses at the restaurants.

Places like Oregon could learn something in Sin City. Hey, I’ve got a novel idea: Let’s send our city councilors and state representatives for a week of partying in Vegas at taxpayer expense. (Oh, wait, that’s been tried already….)

photo: Wax Harrison Ford, 2010

It was the golden age of newspapering — had we but known it at the time.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, newspapers across the country were hurtling into the stratosphere, fueled creatively by good journalistic karma left over from Watergate and driven financially by a booming economy that had nowhere else but newspapers to advertise itself.

Newspapers had so much money in those days they could do practically anything. As a young reporter, I was once given a week off with pay as a reward for doing a good story. (These days I’m required to take weeks off — without pay — to help the publisher survive.)

I once spent five days on the newspaper’s expense account in San Francisco to cover a scientific conference, then decided the conference was boring and filed a story instead about a juicy Bay Area serial murder case. No one yelled at me when I got home.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram was not exactly the jewel in Knight-Ridder’s crown, but we sent reporters around the world on stories and had Washington and Sacramento correspondents.

The last time I saw the elegant old six-story PT building, it was boarded up, surrounded by chain link and barbed wire, about to be converted into luxury condos. What was left of the newspaper, which had once been a major political player in Southern California politics, now existed in rented office space in a Long Beach high-rise.

I was reminded of all this when I found a collection of old press cards while cleaning out the studio the other day.

An article in the New York Times this week traces the collapse of professional photography as a career. The situation of photographers, of course, is exactly analogous to that of reporters and magazine writers. In the past, the technical demands surrounding publishing acted as a gatekeeper for writers and photographers. Because publishing stories and photos was fairly expensive, publishers wanted people with some actual technical skills. It worked out as a good deal all around. Writers and photographers got paid; publishers and the reading public got expertise.

Now comes the Web and everyone’s a critic — and a writer, and an editor, and a photographer. It sounded like a good thing at the time, opening the discussion to many voices instead of the few. Unfortunately, though, the democracy of the Web has devalued everyone’s voice to the point that there are real questions about the survival of reporting and photography as professions.

Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of irony?

It wasn’t just the Web. On a deeper level, newspapers had begun losing their purchase on the public’s mind by the 1990s. Most newspapers in the United States were, and many still are, being written for an imaginary Leave It to Beaver audience from the 1950s, who seem to demand a steady diet of sports writing, business boosterism and city hall minutia, all described in the dead jargon and stultifying conventions of journalese.

Why should anybody be surprised that our long-captive audience started walking out in droves when an exciting new show, written in the actual language of the day, suddenly opened across the street? Never mind that it has no content or plot. It has energy.

In the quirky Australian movie “Newsfront,” newsreel photographer Len McGuire laments the demise of the movie newsreel business, done in by the arrival in post-war Oz of television.

“It feels like something’s over,” he tells his girlfriend. “It feels like….”

“Like growing up,” she says.