I retired from four decades in community journalism after reaching Medicare age this past June 29.
My timing was great, and I left on my own terms. Three days later, my former immediate supervisor was laid off. Two months earlier, the PEW Research Center reported newsroom employment in the United States dropped 23% between 2008 and 2019. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered more job losses.
Had I known in 1978 the newspaper industry would be in a downward spiral, I would have made a career change years ago. Before the Great Recession arrived in late 2007, I penned a parody of You’re So Vain for a young co-worker, a member of Mensa, who left the business after his first newspaper job to become a financial investigator. I came up with the lines: “You’re such a brain/You’re smart enough to get out of this business.”
I do not sulk at night over what I could have done differently in my life, now that my youth is long gone. Instead, I’m working on my second act: writing my first novel. I’ll get paid only if I complete the novel and sell any books. I’m financially secure, so my livelihood does not depend on how well the book sells.
But, guess what? I’m enjoying what I’m doing. It’s an opportunity to put words to print and be creative in the process. I found little such enjoyment when I worked for small newspapers—often for pay similar to what an entry-level teacher draws. A quick online search told me the average novel is 50,000 to 70,000 words. So far, I have written about 15,000 words. I try to write as many as 500 words a day. On some days, I write none. I have no targeted deadline.
I’ve been told reporters at small newspapers have an average workload of two stories a day, roughly 500 words apiece. My productivity has varied. On rare days I did not file any stories because sources fell through or it was a slow news day. However, at one newspaper I wrote as many as three stories on deadline out of a meeting of the county supervisors. On one unusually busy day, I wrote seven stories at that same newspaper. Management even cut me slack, authorizing overtime.
It was quantity over quality, with an increased likelihood of errors. I recall working at one newspaper where the city editor met behind closed doors with the reporters and called us “hacks.” He apparently meant it in the sense of churning out a lot of copy; years later it came to be called “churnalism.” His remarks did not go over well. One colleague was so offended that he wrote a memo in which he included a definition of the word hack. The managing editor also used that term in a conversation with me. The term gained a political edge in 2020 when then-U.S. Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., called a CNN reporter “a liberal hack.”
In essence, I easily wrote the equivalent of a novel in words in 10 weeks on a job. However, now I am not writing it under newspaper deadline pressure. I am setting my novel in a fictional small town in the California desert. The name of the town, Backwater, is a metaphor. I have lived and worked in the journalistic backwaters. I’m on chapter six. While I know how the story is going to end, I do not have it mapped out on how the novel will get there. I am using my imagination to create scenes along the way and new characters.
Granted, I’m getting a late start in writing a book, but I am not the first to do so. The late Irish-born schoolteacher Frank McCourt was roughly the same age in 1996 when he published Angela’s Ashes, a memoir about growing up impoverished in Limerick, Ireland. The book garnered a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie.
While my eyes are not set on a Pulitzer Prize, I’m having fun. Are you as well?
Ken, good for you. It will be fun to see how this unfolds.