Last week, when I was discussing the possible departures with a colleague who was considering a buyout, it struck me how many times I have read about buyouts and layoffs and just shrugged it off. The steady downward drumbeat in the legacy news business has generally left me inured to the consequences. After all, the same is happening in other industries. Sprint is in the middle of layoffs, and Hewlett-Packard has hinted that it will be looking at more in the near future. Warner Brothers has begun job cuts that will eliminate about 12.5 percent of the studio’s staff. The people at those companies will experience consequences no less dire than those in the news industry, and the loss they feel will be no less acute.

And it’s always good to remember that things could be worse, far worse, in a business as challenged as journalism. At the Tribune Company, executives, framing the decision as a modern shift toward flexibility that many digital enterprises utilize, announced last month that dedicated vacation time was being wiped out, giving workers “the freedom to decide when and for how long to take time off.” Staff members were not impressed by their emancipation and pushed back. The policy was rescinded a week later, “based on valuable input from employees.” By that, Tribune executives must mean the same people they never consulted when the company unilaterally took away vacations in the first place.

And it goes from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. At The Orange County Register, which has struggled through layoffs and misguided expansions, the delivery of the newspaper was interrupted after the company failed to pay The Los Angeles Times for the service. In November, reporters and other employees at The Register were asked to field phone calls from irate customers who didn’t receive their papers, as part of a “We Care” initiative. And, as my colleague Christine Haughney pointed out, employees who made 20 calls over two days became eligible to win “four Maine lobsters, fresh steamers and New England clam chowder.”

Now that’s some mighty disruptive thinking: Instead of hiring people to take care of customers, why not entice other employees to do it, and pay them in crustacean instead of cold cash?

It gets even more difficult to believe. Reporters are also among those now being asked to, um, deliver the newspaper.

People willing to rise early and deliver the paper on critical days would receive not cash, but gift cards.

“A full route — which averages about 500-600 newspapers — earns $150 in Visa gift cards,” a company memo read, adding, “as a novice, sorting papers and delivering a route typically requires between 3-6 hours to complete.” The memo then suggested that employees bring “a companion to help toss papers and navigate the route.” (When I read that, I ran a scenario in my mind in which I asked my spouse or children to get out of bed while it was still dark and help me deliver newspapers to support my journalism habit. It would not go well.)

So while some disruption leads to innovation and new ways of reaching consumers, there’s this other kind, in which news organizations are so bereft that they beg professionals whose job it is to fill the newspaper to then switch job assignments and throw it into people’s front yard. To reporters at The Register who have suffered through job cuts, rollbacks and retrenchments, and now these latest indignities, that probably doesn’t scan as progress. It probably feels like a whole lot of disruption.