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June 18, 2008
Short-sighted, compulsive and in love with what I do
What would you do if you found yourself in a dying industry? Would you leave? Would you stick it out to the bitter end? What if you loved it even as it died? Would you take a class here and there, "How to build lifeboats" outside the 9-to-5 obligations of your job as a deckhand on the Titanic? Or would you instead work un-clocked overtime, bailing water as the ocean rose?
I'm in a profoundly sick industry, and I don't know what to do. I know what I am doing, what I think I will continue to do for as long as I have a job. I've decided to stick with ink and paper for as long as ink and paper sticks with me. But I don't know how long that's going to be, or whether I'm making the right decision.
In my time as a business reporter, I've met folks who saw the warning signs as they headed to the mill, the smelter, the assembly line. They kept making paper, aluminum, trucks, whatever, until the money ran out and their livelihoods evaporated. Then they had to choose between spartan early retirements, entry-level crap wages in low-skill jobs, or a return to school for training as something completely new.
Maybe whatever happens next for me will help me have even greater empathy for America's manufacturing workers who have already suffered so much because of the bottom line.
News has become untethered from the things that once paid its way. Subscriptions once covered the costs of distributing a newspaper, the number of papers sold justified the price of advertising, and the advertising dollars covered the costs of gathering the news. Now fewer people are buying news, advertisers are paying less or just not coming to us at all, and newspapers across America are in financial shock.
Revenues have been falling for years, but the decline seems to have escalated in recent months as help wanteds and real estate ads have evaporated with the down economy. Who's hiring, after all? Who's buying houses?
My newspaper laid people off this year. Folks I know from the Society for Professional Journalists also got the ax. Dozens of Oregonian employees have accepted buy outs since late last year. More than 100 journalists, half of the people who made me fall in love with newspapers, took early retirements from the Washington Post in May.
The bad news about the newspaper business is concrete and relentless.
Yet when I dream about the future, I dream about digging deep to find the meaning behind the surface, writing well-told and illuminating tales, finding new stories and new ways to tell them.
When I think about continuing education, I think about taking accounting to improve as a business reporter, Web development classes to learn better ways to present my work online, writing workshops to hold the words together better. If I take an economics class, it's so I can better interpret economics for my readers, not so I can become an economist some day.
Should I be thinking about this differently? Hedging my bets more thoroughly now, while I still have a paycheck? I'm not worried that my job is in any immediate risk, I don't mean to imply that it is. If I start now, though, I could theoretically work my way towards a new career so that I'm ready if the day ever comes that I do need to seek a new job. Maybe I should be volunteering somewhere, earning a master's degree, something.
Unless I find a "something" that moves me as much as what I'm already doing every day, though, I think I'll keep showing up to mop the deck of my sinking ship. I love it too much to do anything else.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at June 18, 2008 10:40 PM
Comments
Fortunately, there will always be news-gathering. Does it make a difference to you if you publish your work product on paper or electronically?
Posted by: underwhelm at June 19, 2008 05:16 AM
No, it doesn't matter to me where my work is published. It does matter that I have a job, with a salary and health insurance. I DO believe that news gathering and reporting will survive, and in a few decades may be stronger than it is today. But there's a shakeout in the works, and very few people are actually making a decent living online right now. Not sure I can wait 10 years on welfare while I wait for the business model to emerge.
Posted by: Courtney at June 19, 2008 08:37 AM
Absolutely you should keep doing what you are doing, particularly the way you do it, at the highest level of skill and constantly training and networking and blogging on the side, etc. You may have to find a new path someday, but with these activities, that path will be easier to find, and related. And in the meantime, remember that newspapering is a magnificent benefit to the rest of us. We desperately need to know, and there is still no substitute for the analytic depth and breadth of the printed word. Radio and TV don't do it.
Posted by: Sue at June 19, 2008 08:52 AM
Become really awesome and work for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or The Economist.
Posted by: Sam at June 19, 2008 07:07 PM