Many of my friends are journalists — reporters, editors, photographers, the many things people do to deliver you the news every day.
But with advertising drying up and Wall Street hammering on news organizations that mostly still seem flummoxed by how to make money online, that’s a tough place to make a living.
A graphic designer started keeping track of all the job loses she heard of on a heart-breaking site called Paper Cuts. (I don’t quite understand how to make the map work every time, but the listings are there nonetheless) In 2009, it’s already more than 2,000 jobs. It’s still January. In 2008, it was more than 15,500.
What does that mean? For someone who believes deeply in the role newspapers serve in an educated, informed democracy, it means fewer people playing the watchdog role and consistently monitoring government, business and other institutions, and also fewer people chronicling our lives and knitting the community together. Yes, I know about social media and bloggers but without real full-time journalists reporting the news, how many of them would lose the material they comment on?
That’s the macro level. At the micro level, it means many of the people who’ve lost their media jobs are probably not going to find another. Lots of talented, experienced people are chasing a shrinking number of opportunities.
The American Journalism Review has a new article called “Is There Life After Newspapers?”
Just under the headline is this subhead: Thousands upon thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in recent years in endless rounds of layoffs and buyouts. What happens in the next act?
I met a Michigan grad this week who recently got laid off from her newspaper job. She’s moved home to live with her parents while she looks for work. We had a familiar conversation about how you don’t choose a career known for its lousy pay and rotten hours if you don’t feel a calling, and the prospect of leaving it can be deeply depressing. I cried big boo-hoos when I left a profession that’s not something you do but something you are.
But AJR offers hope. In an unscientific survey of journalists who’ve lost their jobs, they found this.
While the overwhelming majority – 85 percent – say they miss working at a paper, they are often happier in their new jobs. Sixty-two percent tell us they had been satisfied in their old newspaper jobs; 78 percent report being satisfied in their new jobs.
So there’s the moral of the story. You can still be nostalgic for the life you left behind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also enjoy whatever comes next.
Trying to figure out what to do after your last career dried up? Forbes offers some ideas of $100k jobs that don’t require a college degree. I’m not sure real estate agent is the best choice right now, but maybe it’ll spark some ideas anyway.
Here’s a question for my pals who’ve left newspapers: In retrospect, how do you feel about that decision?
7 Comments
Colleen
From Twitter: stevejfox @cnewvine..As another dotcom refugee said: “happiness is (fill in the blank) in your rearview mirror) What wud i miss — newsroom politics?
Jim Tobin
Ten years ago, and about six months after I left the paper, a friend of mine asked: “Do you miss the Detroit News?”
“The Detroit what?” I said.
I missed my friends and even a couple editors. I missed the fun of a big news night in the city room. I didn’t miss the daily-ness of a daily newspaper — the insistence that all that mattered was what was happening right now. I learned a lot as a newspaper reporter. I’m glad I was one, though I wish I’d left after eight years instead of twelve. Leaving meant that, as a free-lancer, I could learn a subject in greater depth and write about it more carefully. I’ve liked that better.
Colleen
Thanks, Jim. You articulated something I think many of us have felt — on election night, or when the plane crashed in the Hudson, I crave that buzz of the newsroom, but that’s like sustaining a relationship on a dozen roses every Valentine’s Day.
No doubt you made the right decision exploring topics in greater depth: http://books.simonandschuster.com/To-Conquer-the-Air/James-Tobin/9780743255363
Colleen
Via email from Katie (Gazella) Vloet, most recently a reporter at the St. Pete Times before moving into PR at Michigan.
When I left the Times in 2002, I was ready for a change from daily newspapers. It’s not surprising, then, that I ended up happier doing something else. I learned a lot during a year and a half at the University Record, and I’ve never had a job I’ve found as fulfilling as the PR rep/health writer/crisis communicator position at the Health System. Now I’m taking the sum of those experiences with me as I begin my job as editor of the Law School magazine.
Having been a daily newspaper reporter did, without question, help me to get all of the subsequent jobs. I can’t think of anything else I could have done for the first several years of my career that would have given me such a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience. I would probably do the same thing again, but only at the start of my career, and only with newspapers as stable as they were in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I don’t think I could do it again at my current place in life; I like living a relatively calm existence. I don’t miss the night cops shifts, or the anxious nights when I worried about how someone would react to a story running in the next day’s paper.
The thing I thought I would miss most of all was the camaraderie with coworkers who were smart, funny, and interested in a broad array of things. But you know what? I’ve had that same experience working at other places. I didn’t veer completely from the newspaper world, and I’ve worked with a lot of newspaper refugees at subsequent jobs. But even coworkers without newspaper backgrounds have been just as smart and funny as anyone I worked with in the old days.
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