For those who've left: any regrets?

The biggest change: Being a good, consistent journalist, at least in sports, is viewed *among other journalists* as almost a minimum requirement.

You have to have a brand. Or at least that's perception. Radio. Twitter. Chats. TV wrap-ups. You have to post pictures of the food you eat. You have to post tweets of the empty stadium you just arrived at. You can't just have sources, you have to be an "insider," and be willing to show your competitors that on a consistent basis. Then there's an inherent pressure to be on the team's "side" - because your competitor at SBNation will be. There's the pressure to be fun, to write short but also long, to be appropriately thoughtful on social media during tragedies so your liberal colleagues are impressed while simultaneously sticking to sports for your conservative readers.

If you work for an outlet where you can't curse, you have to wish you could. You have to find a charity and stump for it.

Somewhere in there, you have to win awards because that's how people get better jobs.

Not sure there's a ton of regret, as much as you can love the work. The internet has squeezed the industry in difficult ways and turned good reporters into twitter-addicted narcissists.

 

I left the newspaper biz 15 months ago and won't go back. I'm still in journalism, at a newsletter. I don't miss newspapers, but at the same time I wouldn't trade the experiences I had. I'm glad I have those to remember and look back on, but there are so many benefits to life now vs. life then, it's not even close.
partition, good luck with the transition. Let us know how it goes, and thanks for starting what has been an excellent thread so far.

 

I sure liked sitting in a high school football stadium press box 45 minutes before kickoff with a bag of good concession-stand peanuts, preparing my play-by-play sheets. In my perfect little fantasy world, it would never get any more complicated than that.

 

Yes, plenty.

rb

 

I didn't get out by choice -- I was thrown into public, as Ron White would say -- but I don't have any regrets.

Less than two years after I was kicked to the curb, I have a much higher-paying job ($4.15 more an hour) with every second of overtime documented. 90 percent of all weekends off (expect the Black Friday-Christmas peak). Off by 3:30 every day. Set schedule. Got 401K, have 144 paid vacation/personal/sick hours to use any way I feel (took me a decade to earn that as a sports writer).

Have been promoted twice and have received two raises in less than two years. Don't think I got even a cost-of-living raise my final six years at the daily paper I was at.

And I still write. Freelance for the state's largest paper and always paid the next week. Have written for smaller papers as well.

I might never get over of how my full-time writing career ended, but I'm in a better place physically, financially and socially with my wife (who struggled with my random days off and long hours).

 

I'll add to the chorus of people with no regrets. That being said, I'm glad I did it.

 

KY, my jellied friend, where do you work these days?

 

shotglass, did you initially apply through your state's government website, or through your city/county site?

 

I went through the state website, agateguy. But then again, I'm within 15 miles of the state capital, so a lot of what I was looking for was state-office work.

I believe that even if you apply through your state, there's a place to indicate what counties in which you would accept employment. Then it's just a matter of finding your nearest civil-service test center.

 

Of all the state jobs that I saw (I got notifications about openings that matched criteria I had previously entered), none was within $30K of what I was making at my Florida paper. And most were $40K below.

Regrets, there would have been more than a few.

 

BTE, this is something I never would have expected.

I took that kind of pay cut leaving newspapers. And I'm happier.