Wanted: Pot editor.

Someone to get all the dope on dope.

Alas, not here at the Toronto Star but at the Denver Post.

In an industry gutted by plunging profits and job chaos, it would be foolhardy to scorn the creation of a novel newspaper beat. Undoubtedly, the Post will be inundated with resumes for the new position, made public last week.

Naturally, given the online obsession of papers — where executives have wrongly embraced digital platforms as an antidote for the dire economics that ail us — print dinosaurs need not apply.

“The Denver Post is hiring an editor to oversee the development and maintenance of a recreational marijuana website. Current employees should express interest in the position by contacting news editor ----.”

Inevitably, we hire from within these days — unless it’s cheaper to hire from without, by laying off veterans (with their burdensome benefits packages) and taking on scrubeenies, novices on short-term contracts who if nothing else are deft at social media. When the drop-dead-date for full-time commitment approaches, well, just open up another can of interns. They’re young, they’re eager, they’re easily exploited. And they can be paid a relative pittance.

Though a shortsighted fix, without the energy of raw recruits to draw upon, newspapers as we know them are doomed.

So the Denver Post is exploring virgin territory by cultivating an unprecedented cannabis beat as traditional specialized reporting jobs on many papers disappear: courts, labour, crime, health etc. And, hey, who needs copy editors? So what if stories are riddled with typos, misspellings, errors and unreadable syntax? We can always fix it online and insert the correction in an “Our Mistake” box.

The late, great Star managing editor Ray Timson, who would tap me menacingly on the shoulder whenever I so much as got the spelling wrong on a person’s name — thereby nearly scaring me into wetting my pants — must be rolling over in his grave. Timson, during one of his out-of-favour periods with the uber-bosses, was sidelined to the Star’s Bureau of Accuracy. That was before the era of newspaper ombudsmen, now known via gender-neutering language as Public Editors.

Staff shrinks yet editors remain disproportionately thick on the bloodied newsroom floor.

The Denver Post, for example, laid off two-thirds of its copy editing pool last year and all its Metro columnists. Hoisted recently was its quarter-century-experience photo editor, on a paper that last year won a photography Pulitzer. Still better off than the Rocky Mountain News, however, which has ceased to exist entirely, shuttering after nearly 150 years of publication. I had friends on that paper, writers with decades of service as ink-stained wretches who discovered their skills were of no consequence when scrambling to find new gigs in a flatlining marketplace. The lucky ones get to slink away with buyouts.

Interestingly, the CEO of the Post — and the 150 papers held by its owner, Media News Group — is a fellow who started out as a copyboy at the Toronto Sun and has spent years as an outspoken advocate for moving news operations to online. He’s a newspaper-killer.

The Post’s wanted ad for a pot editor attracted a heap of stunned reaction from readers, mostly disapproving. To which the editor of public policy and digital publications tweeted: “The times they are a changin’.”

The times, they are a-roil.

Perhaps a marijuana niche makes sense for the Post. Colorado legalized recreational pot use last year. Imagine the online ads that could be attracted by this juicy forum. Because, thus far, online advertising contributes mere pennies on the dollar to our revenues. Digital subscriptions, newspapers hunching behind firewalls, are supposed to be the Hail Mary corrective but . . . I don’t think so. Free aggregate sites are easily accessed. What you’re prevented from reading here you can graze elsewhere.

Star readers are fortunate because we have retained an excellent, aggressive investigative team, which many papers consider an expensive luxury. In the last six months, led by investigative editor Kevin Donovan, the crew has worked its ass off digging into the myriad Rob Ford scandals. It’s the kind of reporting that can’t be done by web squads — the only area of journalism now thriving.

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I once had an editor who, following the afternoon news meeting, would stride through the newsroom shouting: “Write, you bastards!”

Now it would be: Write! Blog! Tweet! Chat!

We have been turned into frantic multi-tasking bots, feeding the online maw. And writing, the love for it, making copy sing, is way down low on value or relevance.

My supremo editor hates it when I write about the newspaper business. “Not helpful,” he said last time.

I am so grateful to have entered this grand profession in the days of plenty, of fat travel expense accounts when we never factored in the cost of covering a big breaking story, of gangbang reporting where the Star could always out-man its competition. As a teenager, I absorbed the wisdom of vintage journalists and delighted in their lore. In the late evenings, copyboys would bring down the first papers hot off the press — still damp and smelling of ink — to reporters lagging in the old Print Room bar, long gone. The thrill never wore off, seeing your byline on the front page.

Not the same, nowhere close to it, banging off a story that’s posted online within half an hour, with instant comment-critiquing.

I understand the necessity of adapting to the new normal. I know I’m a relic, a newspaper anachronism who still buys the four Toronto dailies out of the box.

But we are mutating the news biz right out of existence.

You’ll miss us when we’re gone.