I get asked two questions several times a week, and I brush off both with a verbal swat.
One — because I’m in my late 20s, I suppose – is when are you getting married? And the other, because it seems like small talk, is why did you leave the newspaper?
I could answer both with a single word: Money.
But I usually deflect the marriage subject, wrongly justifying it as an acceptable passing question, with a practical reason: I’m not eager to have children. And I answer the news question with something to which my audience can nod along: “It didn’t seem like a sustainable career path.”
But that’s a cold and detached answer. I don’t feel cold and detached about news, and I only give that response under the assumption that people don’t want to hang around for the full story – ironically, the same reason newspapers aren’t really working anymore.
So here goes. This is the real reason why I left news: I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied.
I started working at newspapers in 2005, the tail-end of the good days. During my first year of work, a Florida newspaper flew me down to the Mexican border to write about cocaine cartel murders back at home. We booked the first available flight, disregarding expense, and arrived before the investigators. That would not happen at a daily newspaper today.
I don’t think the Internet killed newspapers. Newspapers killed newspapers.
People like to say that print media didn’t adapt to online demand, but that’s only part of it. The corporate folks who manage newspapers tried to comply with the whims of a thankless audience with a microscopic attention span. And newspaper staffers tried to comply with the demands of a thankless establishment that often didn’t even read their work. Everyone lost.
People came to demand CNN’s 24-hour news format from every news outlet, including local newspapers. And the news outlets nodded their heads in response, scrambling into action without offering anything to the employees who were now expected to check their emails after hours and to stay connected with readers through social media in between stories.
There was never such a thing as an eight-hour workday at newspapers, but overtime became the stuff of legend. You knew better than to demand fair compensation. If any agency that a newspaper covered had refused to pay employees for their time, the front-page headlines wouldn’t cease. But when it came to watching out for themselves, the watchdogs kept their heads down.
A little more than a month after I left the newspaper, I went to Key West for a friend’s wedding. I realized on the drive home that I had never taken a vacation – aside from a few international trips – without some editor calling with a question about a story. I remember walking down Fifth Avenue in New York on my birthday a few years ago, my cell phone clutched to my ear and mascara running down my face, as an editor told me that he thought the way I had characterized a little girl with cancer needed to be sadder.
To many people, and even to me, part of the draw of news is that it never stops. You wholly invest yourself in a story – until something bigger happens. The only guarantee in any workday is the adrenaline rush. And even when the story isn’t terribly thrilling, you’ve still got a deadline to contend with, a finite amount of time to turn whatever mess you’ve got into 12 to 15 column inches that strangers would want to read.
The flip side to the excitement is the burnout. You’re exhausted, and you’re never really “off.” You get called out of a sound sleep to drive out to a crime scene and try to talk with surviving relatives. You wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, realizing you’ve misspelled a city councilman’s name. You spend nights and weekends chipping away at the enterprise stories that you never have time to write on the clock.
Everyone works so hard for so long and for such little compensation. The results are dangerous.
We saw it with the Supreme Court health care ruling, as our national news leaders reported the decision incorrectly. We saw it with the Newtown massacre, when initial reports named the suspect’s brother as the shooter. Major news outlets are no better than bloggers if they adopt a policy of getting it out first and correcting it later. They don’t have the money to fend off the resulting lawsuits, and they don’t have the circulation numbers to allow people to lose faith in their product.
Newspapers always have been liberal places where people work hard for little pay, because they believe in the job. They always could empathize with the poor. But pay continues to dwindle to the point that I wonder what kind of person, today, enrolls in journalism school?
I took a pay cut when I moved back from Florida to Charleston, expecting to make up the difference quickly. Instead, I quit my newspaper job at 28, making less money than earned when I was 22.
I can’t imagine anyone outside of an affluent family pursuing a career with so little room for financial growth. And I wonder: Would that well-to-do reporter shake hands with the homeless person she interviews? Would she walk into a ghetto and knock on a door to speak with the mother of a shooting victim? Or would she just post some really profound tweets with fantastic hash tags?
Maybe that’s what people – editors and readers – put at a premium now. Maybe a newsroom full of fresh-from-the-dorm reporters who stay at their desks, rehashing press releases and working on Storify instead of actual stories, is what will keep newspapers relevant.
But I doubt it.
The day I announced my resignation, I had to cover the alcohol ban on Folly Beach. The photographer working the story with me said very little about my decision, except for one heartbreaking statement: “But you were made to do this.”
I had thought so, too. For so long, people had asked me what I would do if my name wound up on a future round of layoffs, if my paycheck were furloughed into oblivion.
I had spent countless hours late at night trolling online for something else that appealed to me. But covering news was the only thing I ever had wanted to do and the only thing I ever had imagined doing.
I started writing stories for my local newspaper when I was 16. I worked seven internships in college, eager to graduate and get into a newsroom. I left school early, school that was already paid for with enough scholarship money that I took home a check each semester, so that I could lug my 21-year-old life to West Palm Beach and work the Christmas crime shift alone in a bureau. And I wouldn’t change that decision for anything.
People in news like to describe a colleague’s departure, especially into a public relations or marketing job, as “going to the dark side.” When word of my resignation traveled through the newsroom, I heard “dark side” references over and over, always with a smile and a wink. I couldn’t help but resent them. But I looked over my cubicle each time and flashed my best Miss America grin instead of the middle finger poised over my keyboard.
I now write for the fundraising arm of a public hospital. Anyone who thinks that’s going to the dark side is delusional. And as my former coworkers ate farewell cake on my last day at the paper, a few of them whispered, “Do they have any other openings over there?”
I don’t know a single person who works in daily news today who doesn’t have her eyes trained on the exit signs. I’m not sure what that says about the industry, but I certainly don’t miss the insecurity.
Sure, it took me a while to get used to my new job. When I go to parties, I no longer can introduce myself as a reporter and watch people’s eyes light up. Instead, I hear how people miss seeing my byline. No one misses it more than I.
News was never this gray, aging entity to me. It was more like young love, that reckless attraction that consumes you entirely, until one day – suddenly — you snap out of feeling enamored and realize you’ve got to detach. I left news, not because I didn’t love it enough, but because I loved it too much – and I knew it was going to ruin me.
Sticky Valentines 
Excellent article and comments from so many sources. Certainly hit a nerve!
As a Shop Steward, it distresses me how many union and non-union employees at me employer are increasingly going on stress leave … some for months at a time.
A Toronto Star article brought me here. Disregard Heather Mallick’s article regarding you. I hope that you continue in a career that brings you joy, be it anything, and I especially hope it will be in news reporting yet again, and soon. You have what it takes.
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Why I left news | Hannah Quinn's Write Stuff
Dear Allyson, You said it all so well. I left a Sydney newspaper – never thought I would – in 1995 for similar reasons. I wanted a career path that valued my work (and wasn’t subject to the whims of the latest editor) and also to find a place where I could achieve something positive in a more constructive way. And to get experience that would make me a better journalist. I spent a few years working in politics, by which time “the darkside” had given me leprosy in the minds of the pure – there was no way back. Nor is there now for many journos following massive media cutbacks. You are so right, newspapers killed newspapers by forgetting what news is and not investing in good people. I’ve also worked for some good companies, and am now in a postion to do what I always wanted to do – take time to write a book. I wish you the very best of luck.
thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m a bit older than you are but we share the same sentiments. I left news when I was about that age too.
My blog entry’s a hit? | Michelle Moriarity Witt
Well written and certainly spot-on. As one who began a career in ’78 and is today working for “the dark side” ;), I too miss the news biz. But I certainly don’t miss the biz side of things. It has become so much less than meets the ear / eye than it once was. I feel today’s news-biz has become more like fast-food prepared by very anxious people. It only has to look good and sound appealing but forget about being cooked all-the-way or even tasty.
Best of luck to you.
I left Gannett for similar reasons, but I didn’t exactly leave the news. Instead, I run a regional magazine, and while the paychecks are irregular and small, the ability to report honestly and on stories virtually ignored by corporate media (for a variety of reasons), is invaluable. After nearly a decade of grinding it out on my own and learning the hard facts of running my own publication (advertisers will drop you if you report honestly on a topic of local political importance, for example), it may actually pay off. We’ll see…
But I completely agree – newspapers these days are their own worst enemy. The Gannett overlords I encountered were the vanguard of an army that believed utterly in institutional mediocrity and chasing after demographics they could never catch. Good luck with the career.
I spent three internships and five years of my newspaper career as a Gannettoid. You’re absolutely right!
Having worked as a journalist for more than 40 years, I think you’ve nailed it, yet maybe missed something too. From the pay point of view, I was lucky; most of my career was as a correspondent for ABC News, and while we weren’t paid at the levels the public thinks we were, I’m sure I made more than my colleagues in print. Note that I don’t say “earned” more, because we all earned the same thing. I was just better compensated for doing the same hard work as everyone else. And for that matter, when I sometimes broke it down to my compensation per hours per week, the rate came to roughly what you’d make taking tolls at a drawbridge.
But here’s what I think you missed: the satisfaction of a job well done. Because when you’ve done the job well, your audience has been the beneficiary. Yes, you’ve had the adrenalin rush, and the privilege of the front row seat where everyone else can only read or hear secondhand about what you got to experience in person. But the audience, whether broadcast or print or online, has learned something they wouldn’t have learned without you (or someone doing what you do). That’s the beauty of living in a society with a free flow of information. Journalists are invested, indeed, with enormous responsibility, because the policy decisions and social decisions and election decisions citizens make depend in part on what we tell them, and how accurately and effectively we do it.
Now, back to what you got right: it is the tail-end of the good days…although frankly, depending on how long one has worked in this business, you might date the end of the heyday to a year long before 2005. Before it was long before 2005 that with the proliferation of news channels and news sites online, it became more important sometimes to get it first rather than to get it right. As you point out, that’s true even of the most august sources of news in the nation. What’s more, because the pie has been divided and subdivided so many times that no one today has a slice nearly as big as they used to, newspapers and networks all have cut their staffs to the point where the quality of what they produce simply can’t own up to bygone standards.
But still, while what you say about the job being both physically and emotionally exhausting is true, I wouldn’t trade a day of it. Well, maybe a day, maybe more than a day, but after all is said and done, the excitement of being a front-row spectator, and the satisfaction of helping people understand the complexities of this world— not to mention the joy we sometimes get to have by beating the bad guys at their own game— is second to none, and I wouldn’t want to work at any other kind of job.
Greg Dobbs
I wonder how news reporters and other journalist feel about this. I can’t wait for New York times response to this.
Tread lightly – [Pressboard]
Worth Reading — 3/27/13 | A Touch of Cass
Good…… Net styl…
A really good analysis of the multiple problems plaguing the news industry, and how youngsters are still rushing into traditional journalism unaware what awaits them. I put in 28 years in the media, 18 of them with India’s leading business daily and was superbly contented with the career. I had always wanted to stop at the age of 50, and I did that last year. I understand that I was lucky to be working during an era when traditional media still had a business model. Wish you the very best in whatever you choose to do from here on. I’m sure you’ll carry the same passion that you have quite visibly demonstrated in your life as a news reporter.
I’ll soon be publishing my resignation letter as a book, recollecting my thoughts about the past 28 years that I spent in the media.
Joe A Scaria
joesnewspicks.blogspot.com
Tuesday before the flood ← Vietnam visa in China
I’m sorry. It sounds like crying to me. Clearly you weren’t made to do this if you gave up. Good luck in your next endeavor and I hope you find your niche. But clearly news was not it.
Wer wirklich am Zeitungssterben schuld ist | 11k2
I agree with Brian. You made the right decision.
Brian J. Karem: Please return to your home under a bridge somewhere. Thanks.
The newspaper business keeps you broke. It can ruin marriages. It can kill you early. Making the often heartbreaking choice to walk away before it does all of these things to you is not weakness. It’s acknowledging that maybe the rest of your life and everybody else who is in it are worth more than a career that demands educated, talented, highly ethical individuals with relentless work habits, then drives them like rented mules and compensates them like unskilled labor.
Amen, Glenn. Those were the precise reasons why I left.
Excellent piece
Former journalist, Nepal
zeugs am donnerstag (wieder mit lalala) | blubberfisch
Web Journalist Blog » A plea: Why you should not leave journalism
awesome
My piece for Poynter: Why it’s still a good time to be a young journalist (with lessons from a Michael Keaton movie) | Scott Goldstein
Thank you for such a good article. The saddess part for me was realizing that parallel transformations have or are happening in many industries in western society. We need to put the value back in what we do. Valuing employees, taking time to do valuable work, and valuing our customers, especially their intelligence.
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Rashmee Roshan Lall | 3 strikes and you're out of the news game:A BBC storyRashmee Roshan Lall
Cate Lecuyer
Dokter’s Weekly Report #29 | Dokter Waldijk
The sad thing is that this blog post is “news.” I think the general public needs to wake up before going to a website under a silly pseudonym to blast away at a journalist’s work. That journalist is probably the only person on the staff working away on that day. The general public is so ignorant about this industry that it’s sickening. Perhaps mass media needs to be taught starting in junior high school. Also, I think Allison was too light on newspaper owners. They are true robber barons of this dysfunction. Can you believe the CEO of Gatehouse News (which has long been de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange) gets annual bonuses of around $1 million while his newsroom staffs dwindle. And we wonder why this country hasn’t turned around economically!
Allison…I saw your story on CNN and found your blog post…It was excellent…I’m a former journalist who spent 24 years in the profession before leaving it in 2003 for many of the same reasons as you….Of course, I still miss the newsroom, but there’s no doubt in my mind that I didn’t leave newspapers–THEY LEFT ME…It’s a shame that so many good journalists have left, or were forced, to leave a job they loved to do. Everyone won with an informed citizenry…Now, because of corporate greed, the PUBLIC will suffer because of an inferior product.
A friend and fellow former journalist, Tim Ghianni, and I recently wrote a book about this very subject….I hope you and others with your opinion will take a look at it…
Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/When-Newspapers-Mattered-Brothers-Shades/dp/1937763331/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1364746955&sr=1-1
Thanks again for the post…
Rob Dollar
Intrigued enough to go to amazon and order a copy. I did 35 years in a State-Record, then Knight-Ridder, then McClatchy daily newsroom. Little of what’s been said in response to Allison’s blog is untrue. Greed? Yes. The public’s lack of understanding and appreciation of what we do/did? Absolutely. Not enough love of the job? I think so. Just because you have a j-school degree doesn’t mean you’re a journalist. I think it’s a gift like that for making music or painting masterpieces, and not enough people love it enough anymore. I’m still sad every day that I don’t chase stories anymore, and I’ve been retired for more than 5 years. Every time I meet someone new, I find myself interviewing them. And I get the inevitable question: “What are you doing? Writing a book?” Sad ending? The people who care don’t count, and the people who count don’t care.
If you had the luxury of retiring from newspapers, then you spent the majority of your career working in a much more functional environment than what she would face working for another 30 years. I don’t think you can compare the two.
Stay engaged until the end « Grammar Guide « copydesk.org
I’m currently 24 years old. As a young child I always wanted to be a sports journalist. At the age of 15, like you I got a local job. I was writing for a small town paper in New Jersey, covering high school sports. I absolutely loved doing that work, so I decided I’d go to the well regarded, University of Missouri School of Journalism. At the same time I was always very active in my faith life as a Catholic, so when I started to think of the priesthood, I thought of a middle-ground. I wanted to be a religion journalist. So as I went off to Mizzou, I studied. I also had internships in the summer as well as other jobs during the year. I was very blessed to have the opportunity to be in D.C. after my freshmen year of college, at 19 covering events on Capitol Hill and more for an international wire service, thus having articles published all over the U.S. and world.
I was in the “convergence” track, learning how to address so many of the issues you raise in your wonderful piece here. While I had no major qualms with the education, I too experienced some of these frustrations. There was a certain unknown, there was a lack of gratification.
So after a few years, I left. I entered seminary, where I still am, four years later, God-willing, with two more years until priestly ordination.
Many people questioned my decision, telling me I was throwing away a promising career etc. Or others would wonder what I didn’t like about journalism. I did and still love journalism. Now, however, I try to use those same skills, as you are doing with writing, for another purpose. I try to use them to help the Church, for now, I help edit our magazine, but I can do this in a much less stressful environment and with a much greater sense of peace, joy and happiness.
More importantly, as time goes on, even when, like you, I still want to get back in the newsroom or be in the know about what’s going on, the peace I have now, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Thank you for your honesty, openness, and willingness to share.
Allison —You have so much to look forward to and so many wonderful adventures ahead …You’ve only just begun!. Like a fine education, having a strong skill set as a journalist is something that no one can take from you. You are using your knowledge of media and work as a journalist to benefit a worthy institution and that’s not such a stretch from your work as a forthright journalist.
The presentation of news is only as good as the people behind it and we all know there are those who are principled and others who are lazy sloppy reporters, editors and managers who cut every corner, play newsroom politics, smooze and yuck it up.
Perhaps your editor was giving you helpful feedback regarding your cancer story or perhaps he was wrong in his point of view, hard to say. When you are a young journalist, I know how much you can take to heart. I remember when I produced a 32 part series on Kids Living With Cancer and my executive editor told me it would be too depressing for an audience … he later said, ‘Thanks for not listening to me’ after it won a National Gabriel Award and his boss said it was the most compelling radio he had ever heard. What I Iearned from those,kids, parents and doctors that I interviewed was that they were the most positive people I ever met … they didn’t want me to paint them with one sad stroke .. they had hope and strength …and can’t spend their day crying, there is just too much to take care of for that. Now that my own husband has been fighting an aggressive cancer, I remember those stories I produced and all the people I met and it has reminded me to stay positive and push on even though my tendency as a longtime journalist is to be negative and cynical.(a cherished newsroom trait and tradition, which also needs some change).
I’m sure you realize that sometimes when an editor gives you feedback, they aren’t telling you to change your copy, but they are looking for some insight from you, after all … You were the one there conducting the interviews, and good editors like their reporters to push back and not relent, especially if they are asking to change the copy from right to wrong just to create some cliche of a story that fits a perception. .
You are still young and will have many opportunities to continue your good work. I began my career at 19 and one day I looked around and found that I was the oldest one in the room. While I have been an editor for most of my very long career both in broadcasting and print, I have stepped in and out of the newsroom to start my own business, pursue many other related opportunities, help others gain access to media and wrote a couple of books, one of which was a best seller. I walked in and out and back in again to the newsroom,… once you leave doesn’t mean that you can never go back if that’s something you want. I’ve found that the most miserable people are those that stay in jobs that they have come to hate or don’t leave because they are afraid or because their ego is wrapped up in being a media star and can’t imagine losing that identify.
You have the gift of communication and we all know how powerful that is… it can be used as a life raft or a lethal weapon… forget the stupid barbs from small minds, they don’t mean anything and they don’t pay your bills. Be proud of your contribution past, and present … (take it from someone who ran out of some of the cruelest newsroom sweatshops … but came back on my own terms)
It’s not about impressing folks with a handle that causes their eyes to light up … it’s about having work that fulfills you and a life that lights up YOUR eyes! Here’s to You!
Jillian Kuhn Warren – Communication | Marketing | Writing | Web | Media | Raleigh & Durham, NC | Around the Web: March 2013
Best post I’ve read
Your eloquence is appreciated. Many, if not all, of your points are why I am leaving the newsroom after 25+ years. I still love the work, just not 70 hours a week worth of it. And based on the positive comments I have received from my new co-workers at our local school district, where I will become the communications director, the ‘dark side” seems awfully damn light and cheery.
The late, great Perry Ashley – my one-time journalism advisor at Carolina – had a simple response to this 19-year-old when I told him I wanted to change majors because “newspaper reporters make no money.” “Vicki,” he said, “if you can communicate, you can do anything.” Discussion over. News-Ed major remained intact. And he was right. I left newspapers after my beloved professor, editor and boss Mark Ethridge died. But the communication skills learned from my journalism degree have served me well in all my professions.
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“When I go to parties, I no longer can introduce myself as a reporter and watch people’s eyes light up. Instead, I hear how people miss seeing my byline. No one misses it more than I.”
My God, you spoke my words, verbatim. I left the business in December 2007, and I miss it so much, I’m actually working to get into radio via our city’s NPR affiliate. I feel like that’s the only security in being a reporter, nowadays.
Great to meet another like me out there (who also went to “the dark side” to survive the recession). Great blog post. Incredibly true. I relate 100 percent.
Former P&C Reporter on CNN | Holy City Sinner
Why Journalism Honestly Fills Me With Fear
Nice piece. So sad. I am a former PB Post reporter (and worked at 7 other papers ovwr 30 years) and now freelance churning out press releases and fluff pieces for hospital web sites. Im glad I had the chance to have a lomg career in journalism. There was nothing better. But I can’t say I miss it now. The last few years were not pretty.
The newspaper business is like a cult. Lured by righteousness, you become convinced that working crappy hours for crappy pay doing difficult work only to get spit in the face for it is a badge of honor. If you consider leaving for a more appealing job, your low-paid colleagues look at you with disgust spitting that arrogant “dark side” cliche at you, suggesting you will never be able to return if you leave the sublime world of newspapering. Then you leave and realize you’ve been duped. Yes, the profession is a noble one. But come on, more noble than teaching? More selfless than social work? If you are a dedicated, industrious, joyful person, you can make any profession honorable, sublime, and yes, even exciting.
Too true, Diana, too true.
I love it when they trot out the line about journalism being a “calling”. What that means is that you are expected to work long hours for poor pay (particularly when you work out the hourly rate) and meet completely unreasonable demands (“find a talking dog that has forgotten to renew its health insurance and is willing to be in a photo, by 5pm”) for the glory of a by-line and the illusory belief that you are making a difference.
No more, I say, no more…
Why I left news | writewireless
Allyson,
In the final year of my time as an Associated Press newsman, my job consumed me with little apparent payback. Graveyard shifts, waking up in the middle of the night to fact-check, deadlines, etc. I wondered whether the wire was ever going to love me back. I left in August of ’99 and have led a very full life since.
You might be interested in a post I wrote about a friend who recently retired after four decades — FOUR DECADES! — as a UPI and AP newsman: http://chairmanmaoindc.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/the-final-wave/.
Best,
Jeff
Born this way? | Sarah Millar