I knew I could no longer be a journalist by 2007—even though it was the only job I’d ever wanted, and I was 14 years deep into a career in the field.
After a long job search for something I could do well as the next act in my working life, I ended up leaving The Herald in Everett, Washington, the final newspaper I worked for full time, in 2008.
It was a wrenching decision for me at the time. Recently, as new ownership cruelly chopped the already dwindled newsroom staff numbers at The Herald by half, I mostly felt relief that I left journalism when I did. It still hurts, however, and makes me wonder what could have been if publishers had made more insightful decisions during my early years in the profession.
Ever since falling in love with writing in the fourth grade, I’d decided that’s what I wanted to do in life. I even wrote my own “newspaper” in fifth and sixth grade. By the time I applied to colleges, I primarily looked at schools with good journalism departments. It’s how I ended up at Linfield University, where Professors Lingle and Gilbert drilled into me how to write tight but captivating lead sentences, inverted pyramid-style story structures, and the basics of effective and objective reporting.
I got my first job at a weekly newspaper on the Oregon Coast just weeks after my college graduation. I knew the sports editor at the time from Linfield, and the editor was (and still is) a kind-hearted, knowledgeable guy who happily shared what he’d learned up to that point. He put up with my 20-something habit of coming in late after covering long meetings the night before and my incessant consumption of Mountain Dew and chocolate.
I met my love while on the staff of The Linfield Review, and when she graduated a few years after I did, I followed her to the small daily paper where she landed her starter job. I got hired just a couple of weeks later.
We loved journalism, despite it all. Despite long hours, especially in those initial jobs, where I covered several city councils, school boards, utility boards, court trials, and even filled in on the sports beat at times and covered Friday night football games. Despite the low pay: I made about $13,000 a year in my first reporting job in 1993, and I didn’t start making more than $8 an hour until late 1997. Despite the deadline pressure, which helped me get stories done on time but also wore on me over the years. Oh, and I often got yelled at by public officials and others not happy with what you reported. Still, I loved it. It was a calling rather than "just a job."
Working under a callous editor in her second newspaper job convinced my wife to leave the profession by 1999. She got into education—a foreshadowing of her eventual career choice—and did some marketing writing on the side.
I moved up through the newspaper ranks, ending up in 2002 at The Herald, which was one of the state’s five largest daily newspapers. The Herald job moved us to the Seattle area, where my family still lives, months before the birth of our first son. The pay was just good enough to live in Snohomish County at the time, and many folks had launched themselves from working at The Herald to jobs at one of Seattle’s two daily papers. There was a clear path ahead.
Then it all went wrong. I remember as a journalist in the late 1990s worrying about the dismissive attitude many editors had about the emerging popularity of the internet. Most newspapers were making fat profit margins; why worry about this new-fangled digital stuff? When newspapers started going online, there was no real strategy. They bragged about their new websites, where they gave away their content for free. It would help lead to their doom.
But there were deadlines to meet. The “beast” needed to be fed every day, so I wrote my stories and tried to be OK with my pay, even as it grew more slowly and then froze around 2006 or so. By that time, we started writing “breaking news” versions of our stories for the website, then longer versions for the print version of the newspaper. Some of us also were blogging for the paper as well. We were doing more work for an eroding paycheck.
Our choice was a familiar one for most families: Have both my wife and I work 40 hours a week, putting our child in an expensive daycare and missing formative time with him, or make it work some other way. In addition to my newspaper job and my wife’s part-time writing job, I snagged a regular freelancing job for a Seattle magazine. After the newspaper’s medical insurance refused to cover much of my son’s complicated post-birth care and drove us into bankruptcy, we needed more income. As a result, I also started doing a manual labor job on weekends.
It's easier to fall out of love with a profession when it doesn’t love you back. I was at that point by 2007. I asked to work from home at times, I asked for a raise; I tried to make it work any way I could. My once-clear career path was clouded by the fact that Seattle’s newspapers were locked in mortal combat, trying to outlast the other as they both saw profit margins fall. They weren’t hiring, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s ownership largely gave up the year after I stopped working in journalism. Big layoffs at both of those newspapers followed.
I would later learn that The Herald’s leadership was drawing up a survival plan of their own by the time I gave my notice in late 2008. The editors figured I would stick around, they told me, despite my constant warning that I couldn’t support my family with what they were paying and no flexibility in working from home.
I was lucky. I got a corporate communications job at The Boeing Company that allowed me to focus on writing and editing. That went well for about a decade, and the pay was good, too. When everything went wrong at Boeing and layoffs followed, I landed my current digital content job, which still focuses on writing and editing.
I don’t wax nostalgic too often anymore about those days when I often had ink stains on my hands. I’ve now been out of journalism for 16 years, about a year longer than I was in the field in the first half of my career. Even so, I mourn the death of newspapers and what we’re losing as a society and a democracy. One newspaper I worked for, the Ashland Daily Tidings in Oregon, has been gone for years. Most of the others are struggling.
So, I “sold out,” some folks would say. I chose my family life and my well-being over striving to pursue my original dream of being a lifelong journalist. I’m fine with that. The reporters who’ve stayed or entered the industry since I left are often being paid even less than I was, the hours are still bad, and an entire part of our population derides them as being “woke,” “leftist,” and not worthy of living. There are so many good reporters doing their best in a thankless job. Most don’t last long, and I don’t blame them.
The business side of journalism has become an object lesson in how to make decisions that help to kill an entire industry, and the pattern is repeating in the local TV and radio sectors right now. “Legacy” media is dying, even as newer forms of media leave me dubious about their longevity as suitable replacements.
Will The Herald be around in five years? I don’t know anymore. If I had to lay down money, I’d bet against it. As a longtime subscriber, that pains me. And I weep for all those kids who, like me, burn with the desire to make a living by writing and learning more about the world. Now, as equity funds and the like strip remaining newspapers of assets and hasten the seemingly inevitable death of the press, that career path is nearly gone. And without reporters shining a light on what’s going on from our neighborhoods to around the globe, we’re all suffering. I don’t see a hopeful end to this yet.
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