Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Keep your day job

 

      Every morning begins with me deleting all the emails that arrived during the night. It doesn't take long. Check a few dozen boxes, flush it all away, unread. Something very satisfying about that, like brushing fresh snow off your windshield. Rarely does anything catch my attention, because most communication is poorly-crafted spoodle that doesn't warrant a second glance. 
     But something called "Digiday Daily"—a bit redundant, yes?—dangled the intriguing headline,
 "‘Quit your f – king job’: How the pandemic has pushed journalists to exit the industry" by Sara Guiglione, and that seemed as good a way as any to dip a toe into the day's media pond. Maybe one of my adventurous former news colleagues will point out a path that could prove useful should I, like the Von Trapp Family, suddenly need to chirp my brief farewell, then make a quick exit out of Austria, through the Alps, toward some unimagined fresh start.
     The story opens with David Rosenfeld, a reporter for the Daily Breeze in Southern California. While noting the Breeze is owned by Alden Capital, the vivisectionist hedge fund, the article doesn't hint at the kneecapping that invariably follows. Perhaps it's assumed everybody already knows. So Rosenfeld quit his $45,000 a year job. His current situation is described this way: "Rosenfeld teaches sailing lessons and charters boat rides from his sailboat." He also has a real estate license and does research for attorneys and is a Lyft driver. Quite busy, though he claims to also be far happier than when he was a journalist.
     Maybe so. And good for him for taking dynamic action. Though that sailboat kinda stuck out for me. Who owns a sailboat on $45,000 a year? Perhaps it's a very small sailboat. But it's also a reminder that people sometimes have all sorts of invisible means of support, well-compensated spouses and such, and the Digiday Daily (try saying that three times, fast) story, for me, waves more unquestioned red flags than May Day in Beijing. Another of the four, count 'em, four journalists in the story recovered from his ordeal at the New York Times by spending a month in Hawaii. A third flees the Wall Street Journal after two years of servitude for the security of a tech start-up, which is like leaving your wife for a stripper you met last night. People do it, though I can't imagine encouraging anyone to consider that path without at least hinting at possible downsides.
     I don't want to pick apart the story, which is competent enough, other than to point out the last sentence:

“The pandemic has drained the life out of [these journalists]. My answer to them is to quit your fucking job," Herrera said. 

     Which made me wonder: why dash the obscene gerund in the headline only to deploy it full strength in the kicker? Maybe Digiday Daily (what's that Australian horn? A didgeridoo) has different standards for headlines and text, or, more likely, no standards at all. That's okay. We're all making it up as we go along.
      Nor do I want to be unkind to the article's author, less than a decade out of college (go Cavaliers!) and gainfully employed as a media critic in a profession that is falling away in big chunks. So my sympathy. Being a media critic nowadays must be like being a village's officially designated mourner during a plague, a hard enough job without having some old crocodile you never heard of rear out of his obscure midwest swamp to snap at you. Think of it as part of the education. Mike Royko once threatened to break my legs: scary then, now a point of pride. (Well, not pride. That's the first thing to go in journalism, whose continual, doglike humiliations are a ... wait a sec, maybe we should all quit).
     Sorry. Yes, writing can be a thankless grind. And the temptation of leaving the sun-baked desert island of any particular place of employment and paddling away on your lashed-together raft to find some imagined ambrosia-scented paradise must be a powerful one. But I feel responsibility dictates pointing out that people who try that also drown. Not everybody who leaves journalism is glad they did. I've seen more than one colleague who quit the paper to go scale the heights of their dreams, or at least snap at a 25 percent raise shilling for some pol, later return to smear their face longingly across the newsroom window and plead to come back. The process of prying their fingers off their old desk and gently leading them away is a heartbreaking one, softly reminding them that certain professions are like being baptized. Some stains just won't wash off.
     Anyway, as a guy who has been on staff of the same newspaper for 34 years, I thought I would put in a good word for holding onto your job, despite the pandemic. Bad years come and then they go. Yes, times have changed, and being strapped to the block, listening to Alden Capital whetting their cleaver, must be a terrifying situation to be in. I thought my friends over at the Tribune did the right thing, grabbing their cush salary-for-a-year buy-out life ring with both hands. Because odds are, if they didn't, they'd likely be laid off anyway in three months with nothing to cling to. Though they're still facing the problem of which direction to go. Sailing off into uncertain waters is no panacea, particularly if you don't own a sailboat.
      It's possible to step back, strip off your barnacles, exercise self-care, as the kids call it, while still maintaining your connection to a publication—my colleague S.E. Cupp just did it, apparently to good effect. In my third of a century at the paper, I've taken off ... calculating ... nearly two years, total, between paternity leave, travel, book projects, rehab, medical leave and, umm, suspensions. I recommend considering that as well, if it's an option. (And it may not be. I'm well aware that anything said by a journalist working under a valid union contract risks straying into "Let them eat cake" territory. If this piece is merely a self-own, a bleat of obliviousness revealing my utter failure to grasp just how lousy the profession has become for people who are not me, well, sorry. I hope I'm not snug in the lifeboat, wrapped in a wool blanket, carping about those splashing around in the icy chop. And I hope this isn't as serious a lapse as Gene Weingarten dissing Indian cuisine, which seemed to echo and reverberate across the globe. For a flippin' month).
     Consider the source. As I've said before, if you're not in the paper, you might as well be dead. That isn't a life imperative that meshes well with becoming a Lyft driver. There is no question that being a journalist is a calling, like being a doctor, though not nearly as well paid. For some of us. For others, well, if you can be more fulfilled renting out your sailboat, don't let me stand in your way. One problem in journalism is that too many people attempting to practice it don't grasp the privilege they enjoy, to snag the attention of the public and give them something worth reading. Or not worth reading, as the case may be. 





16 comments:

  1. You still have the best job in the world, Mr. S...ask the man who knows. I was the Walter Winchell of my junior high paper, a columnist during both seventh and eighth grade. My column gradually became more of a gossip column. When I got too snarky, I was suspended, and then unceremonously fired, but I was very young, and shrugged it off. I peaked far too early.

    Royko never threatened to break my legs, because I never had the balls to talk to him. Although we did mumble a few slurred words to each other once. It was while we were whizzing, side-by-side, into the urinals at the Billy Goat. He was fried, but I was merely buzzed. Hell, I was on my lunch hour.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No question about that. Royko always reminds me, somewhat incongruously, of lines from a Joni Mitchell song: "You're mean when you're loaded...."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mean. And naz-ty. Got arrested at a joint on Lincoln Avenue, for starting a fight with a loaded ketchup bottle. Remember the Billy Goat barstool with his name on it? One night, a pressman from the Tribune ignored all the written and verbal warnings, and sat there anyway. Mike showed up, and had a fit. Then he tried to knock the guy off his perch. Royko wound up on the floor, after getting clocked. Didn't see it happen, but I wish I had. Newspaper people talked and laughed about that incident for a long time.

      Delete
    2. That Royko couldn't take the slightest criticism without flying off the handle, while you permit your readers to pick at your peccadillos without any hostility, is evidence enough that you are fulfilling your main life goals.

      john

      Delete
    3. I'm not sure I'd say without ANY hostility. But to stay fresh, a writer needs to be open to outside input. Otherwise you ossify, and become a parody of yourself. Remember the hot water Royko got in over his crack about Mexicans? I'm sure some editor either tried to save him and was ignored, or was too browbeaten to say, "Hey Mike, you probably don't want to slur an entire country like that."

      Delete
    4. Thanks for jogging my memory, Mr. S. I read about the bank-robber son in one of the more detailed Royko biographies. Whatta helluva life he lived. I despise the term "jaw-dropping"--but it fits in this case. Mine was in my lap.

      Have you ever read the book of letters he wrote to his future wife (who later died suddenly, at 44), when he was in his early twenties and in the Air Force? They won her heart. The man definitely had some major design flaws, but his writing talents were not among them.

      Delete
  3. Mr. Royko was my neighbor for a few years in my early 20s. I acted like I didn't know who he was. He seemed to appreciate that. Talked about woodworking and my dog. I found his writing entertaining. Maybe a touch over rated . Different than Mr. S but good enough to spend a dime and eventually a quarter for the opportunity. Think one of his books is around the house someplace.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think you're being unfair to him. (I sense a pattern here). As much as he was a jerk, personally, his writing had a role in moving us into the modern age, where the little guy doesn't quite get the shaft the way he once did. Royko wrote many brilliant columns—he's still overrated, in that people forget he could write some real clunkers. But I used to think that, at his best, reading Royko was like having a chip put in your head, where his thoughts became your thoughts because they were so spot on.

      Delete
    2. Damn betcha, Mr. S...after MLK bought it, he said something along the lines of: "There is a gun being put to our own heads. And nobody is holding it there. It is our own finger and our own trigger." Never forgot that one.

      And after the sudden death of his wife, he wrote: "If there's someone you love but haven't said so in a while, say it now. Always, always, say it now." Which, at 74, I do. A lot. You never know.

      There are probably many Roykoisms in my head. But those two are more than enough.

      Delete
    3. I only saw him once, in the lobby at a Remains Theatre production, perhaps "Speed-the-Plow." I don't think I approached him, just thought "Cool, there's Mike Royko." I was surprised to see him there, as, whatever the play was, it wasn't something that I'd have expected Slats Grobnik to have attended...

      Delete
  4. To appreciate Royko's writing, simply peruse anything scrawled out by Kass.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No need for that. Find the column he wrote about the faceless Vietnam vet knitting hats in his basement. That is column writing at its best. Or the column he wrote no the unveiling of the Picasso. Just the reporting on that. Hugh Hough, from the Sun-Times, heard applause that wasn't there. Royko heard silence.

      Delete
  5. I find myself very curious about what your suspensions were for, though if they were in your drinking days the stories might not be as interesting as they would be otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure I've told those. No, one was mouthing off to the publisher, stone sober. The other was waiting for my rehab-related legal woes to work themselves out. Old history now.

      Delete
  6. G. K. Chesterton wrote a little poem that bears on the subject.

    "And I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
    and rare in our pockets was the mark of the mint.
    When we were angry, and poor and happy.
    And proud of seeing our names in print."

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hall of Fame hitters fail 70 percent of the time. A columnist with that record would be cleaning sailboats for a living. Not every column is a home run, even from giants like Royko. Regular readers of good writers will occasionally turn the page rather than finish a disappointing piece. That doesn't mean the next one won't be exceptional. The great ones, like Royko, demand that you read to the bottom every time.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated, and posted at the discretion of the proprietor.