The homeless editor

The homeless editor has found a home, according to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Rich Jackson is general managger of the Spooner (Wis.) Advocate and Sawyer County Record. 'Homeless Editor' Rich Jackson named GM of Spooner Advocate, Sawyer County Record

I checked the Advocate's website, and he is on the masthead. So, a happy ending.

 

Have been to Spooner several times. Nice small town, should be affordable, lots of lakes nearby.

 

The Sawyer County Record covers Hayward, home to the American Birkebeiner.

 

When I first started and was making a cool $15k a year, I really thought about just sleeping in the office to save money. I was working 16 hour days and was the only person in the building after finishing pages. I only slept in my apartment and was never there otherwise.

I read too many Boxcar Children books as a child.

 

When I first moved back to California and had a security guard job at night, I wound up with two weeks in between places to stay because the apartment wasn't available, so I either slept in the car after work or found a place in the building that had a couch, and set an alarm to make sure I was out of there before employees showed up. It wasn't ideal: one morning the police banged on the window of the car to see if I was alive because someone thought there was a dead person outside their building -- but I had no real problems, other than the discomfort.

I've slept under the desk in radio stations when I worked late and needed to do morning drive, at the Telegram when putting together tabs by myself and at Turner when NASCAR races ran late, just because I was either too tired to feel comfortable driving home or the distance involved was too great. But never in place of a permanent situation.

 

I secretly lived in my office for 500 days | Salon.com

I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

 

At my last stop before my journalism career hit the rocks, I was doing a weekly commute away from my family and considered buying a VW bus and sleeping in it. Figured I'd get a gym membership for shower purposes. Probably woulda saved a good amount of money.

 

A former colleague had an arrangement for housing years ago while he worked at a daily paper. IIRC, it was in Belvidere, Il.

 

I did it once. We were a PM and I was on morning desk, started at 6 a.m.
I went to a Dodgers game with our beat guy and that ended up at the Shortstop, the bar around the corner from Dodger Stadium on Sunset Blvd., mostly populated by cops from the nearby Police Academy.
We got back to the office at 3 a.m. I figured I'd lose another hour by going home and coming back the next morning. So I pulled my car out of the busy back lot and parked on the side in the executive parking lot. I knew none of them would show up that early. No problem. I just worried somebody might notice that I wore the same clothes two days in a row.

 

Nothing like the early shift on a PM. I worked the wire for awhile at a 25K daily. I lived outside of town, so I was up around quarter to 3 to be on the job by 5. I was usually asleep by 7 p.m. back then -- except on those Friday nights when I had to cover the wire, when I often got to sleep by a quarter to 3. A lot of swing-shifters find themselves in the same rut. As professional wrestling announcer Roger Kent said a hundred thousand times, "They ought to ban it!"

One memorable night was one July 4 because my rich-bastard neighbor liked to set off municipal-scale fireworks displays (no exaggeration). I can say by experience that you can get to sleep even if explosive shockwaves are rattling your house.

 

We used to be an afternoon paper during the week that switched over to an AM on the weekend, so on Fridays we'd work a split shift with two deadlines around 11 a.m. and midnight. I live an hour from the office, so on those days where I had to do the double shift I'd often come back from lunch and quietly slip into an unused back office for an hour or two of naptime. Woke up about 3:30 or 4 refreshed and ready to go.

And then every October we have a big 10K run in town that starts at 8 a.m. on a Saturday. That's a quick turnaround for a one-man staff that often gets done with the weekend edition at 1 or 2 a.m. after covering football, so I've packed blankets and pillows and just made a pallet on the floor of the office. If I'd driven home I'd have had to get up two hours later and turn around and come back anyway.
I didn't care. I'm a guy. I've slept in my car and plenty of other less than 5-star accommodations in my life. And it was basically a long nap, not a full night's sleep. It didn't bother me any. When I told a few co-workers my plan, though, you'd have thought I was permanently living in a box behind the building. A couple of them offered to let me sleep on their couch, even though they'd gone home hours earlier and I'd have been calling them at 2 a.m. like a drunk relative to tell them I'm on the way.

 

We're talking about a guy who lived in his office and no one's posted this?