By Nancy Barnes
Star Tribune Editor

In the late 1990s, I was an editor at a newspaper in North Carolina when we developed a Sunday front-page story that would seem unthinkable now: "Life in the land of 2 percent unemployment."

This was the height of the dot-com era, and employers everywhere were scraping the bottom of the employment barrel to find good employees.

Many Americans thought we were in a new sort of economy, where tech stocks only went up, houses could double in value in just a few years and old-fashioned economic values were considered passé by some.

Seems downright naïve today.

Fast-forward past the collapse of the tech bubble, the real-estate bubble and the credit bubble, and we have life in the land of 8 to 10 percent unemployment.

The Great Recession may actually be history, based on the standards by which we measure economic growth, but its impact has transformed life as many Minnesotans know it, perhaps permanently.

Will we ever see 2 percent unemployment? Probably not, since surely that was a harbinger of an economy out of whack.

Will we ever see 4 to 6 percent unemployment, which is considered healthy? Certainly, we all hope so for the sake of our children and out-of-work colleagues and friends.

Some of these trends are cyclical: As we were emerging from the last recession, our reporters were writing about the jobless recovery and chronicling the march of the stock market back over 10,000, then 11,000 and 12,000.

That all sounds familiar this go-around.

What isn't familiar is the depth of the collapse of the housing market, the entrenched nature of unemployment and the nagging questions about whether this is a permanent change to our economy more than a cyclical one.

Our reporting cannot answer that question, which bedevils some of the nation's top economists, but we can use our reporting power to explore how it is affecting life in our back yards.

As Minnesotans, along with other Americans, struggle to adjust to these new economic realities, reporters from our local news, business, and lifestyles staffs are fanning out this year to chronicle the lasting impact of the Great Recession for families, workplaces, businesses and lifestyles.

Business Editor Todd Stone said his reporters will be watching the health of the economy through the housing market, investment, employment trends and consumer behavior.

In our Variety section, we will also try to bring you tips on how to maneuver in these economic times.

As we reported last week, banks are starting to see a rebound after the carnage of 2008. Retail stores have seen some growth in revenues, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is back above 12,000.

But as this Sunday's front-page story also shows, the Great Recession has left many deep scars.

In some households, retirement plans have been drastically scaled back, while in others, young adults are struggling to find their first good jobs. (Flipping burgers doesn't count.)

Small-business owners are fighting to hold on, waiting for customers to start spending again, while startups are scouring for hard-to-find venture capital.

Many homeowners remain underwater on their mortgages, while others continue to file for bankruptcy. Workers' wages are stagnant, even as inflation starts to seep into everyday life.

All of this is scary to many Americans brought up to think that life will always be better for the next generation, but history has also taught us that the American free-market economy, given time, is remarkably resilient.

Nancy Barnes is the Star Tribune's editor and senior vice president for news. Follow her on Twitter @nancycbarnes.