When to call it quits?

Yes, I know. But I've no idea how long he's been with them.

After I join the foreign service next year, I have a shot at making the vacation time but will never touch the $74k, even after 20 years - unless I completely change career fields.

My other brother-in-law is also federally employed, and he might at one point put in 15 years, but he probably won't progress past a GS 9 just due to his position.

A lot of the $74k figure is location, too. In my hometown, that's the upper stratosphere of the pay scale. In other places, it's solid middle class.

And I can't think of anyone I know at all with five weeks of vacation. My brain can't even comprehend that one.

 

That was goddamn awesome when I had it. Can't tell you how many great vacations we took at the end of the year ... just because.

 

If things from this point never changed (salary, cuts to other staffers, etc.) I would be content for a long time. I just know that's not the case. I'm not nervous about MY job security, but I also don't want to be in the band that plays as the ship sinks.

There is a time to jump, and I'm thinking it's sooner than later.

 

My leaving was not by choice, so you can take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'm going to go against the general consensus and suggest that you should stay put for now. Or, if you want, perhaps look for another, better job within journalism.

But I don't think I'd leave the business right now if I were you.

I will say that any decision about whether to leave now, or not, might depend very much on your age and/or any related likelihood of being able to get something else relatively easily right now (or within the next five years).

But...you're happy in your job. You still love what you do. You said you're not worried (as of now) about your job security. And, you don't know what, if anything, else you might want/need to do, anyway.

So why do you want to jump? Because not everyone appreciates what you do? That's going to be the case in almost any job.

My point is, if you don't really want to leave, and don't have to, well, then, maybe you shouldn't. Perhaps you should just enjoy and appreciate what you have right now.

Life shouldn't be lived always worrying about tomorrow, and about things that might happen.

Because they might not.

 

Everyone in newspapers should be worried about his or her job security.

Hoops Weiss was laid off, for goodness sakes. Literally (and I mean that literally) no one is safe.

 

I used to. And then I got out.

I simply wasn't happy in it. Ownership. Boss. Demands. Unfunded mandates. So I moved my family back to my hometown and took my old job at my hometown paper at half the salary while my wife and I began working with a nonprofit at the same time. Then halved my take-home pay two years later to go full time with the nonprofit. (Shortly after, the paper cut a third of its newsroom.)

My weekly pay check, after taxes and insurance, is under $275. But my wife makes a little more, we have few debts and we have absoluterly no housing expenses. And a very rewarding job.

And I'm having a ball.

When its time to get out, be in the position to get out.

 

Can't argue with that.

But it's not as though newspapers are the ONLY profession where positions are hacked.

Bank of America is in the process of cutting 30,000 jobs. Hewlett-Packard will whack 29,000 by 2014. Citigroup whacking more than 10,000. Pepsico slashing 8,500.

Google --- Google! --- is cutting another 1,200 jobs from its Motorola division . . . in addition to the 4,000 previously announced last August.

Out of the frying pan . . .

 

You're usually more up to speed than this.

Many of those aren't layoffs. In fact B of A said most of those cuts will come from attrition and eliminating unfilled positions over a time span of years. So, yeah, the jobs aren't going to be there in the future, but nobody is getting drop-kicked out of the office. With newspapers, it's an actual person losing an actual job.

And while layoffs are happening, the industries themselves aren't also vanishing. A person laid off at Google can apply a whole lot of other places at similar salaries. There isn't a lifestyle change involved. That doesn't happen with journalists because the jobs don't exist.

 

There was a time when I felt newspapers would rebound, they'd get the web figured out etc. But the resources just aren't there to compete. And newspaper business plans have depended on being "the only game in town" for the last 40 years. The problem is they are now competing with every newspaper published for eyeballs, not to mention magazines etc.

 

Obviously, it's a case by case thing when deciding the time to jump ship.

I was just fed up with it all: the hours, the pay, the lack of resources, the thought of "didn't I just attend this?" before realizing that was a year ago to the day. I was slowly pissing my life away in a shit hole town with an even shittier four letter newspaper company. That I was single and had nothing tying me down made the move a no-brainer for me.

I've been out of the business full-time for less than a month, and I'm a little surprised to find out that it hasn't been the life-altering move I was expecting ... at least not yet. Then again, I'd probably feel differently if I had a job with benefits locked down. But there's something to be said for time with family, making weekend plans and filing a freelance story at 7 p.m. and not having to worry about layout, roundups and call-ins.

Yeah, there's a little uncertainty on my end along with a temporary hit in the wallet. I just wanted the chance to be happy, and now I've got it.

 

I'm a regular poster here who decided to post this anonymously because, well, it's easier to show some discontent for my industry in this manner.

I graduated college not too long ago, and while I have found work in this industry, it didn't take me long to discover the downsides. These include, obviously, low pay, few benefits, small towns and lots of late-night questioning of why I got into this industry.

Why do I continue doing this? Probably partly because I have a misguided dream that I can one day reach the top, covering elite college or professional teams. Partly because at the end of the day, when journalism is done correctly there is little that can match the satisfaction. And your best work (and, unfortunately, your worst) is marked with your own byline.

But HOW can I get out is the question. One, I don't know what else I'm good at; two, I can't exactly afford to go back to college and get a different degree; three, I don't want to look like a failure to my peers both in age and profession; four, if I get over my fears and could figure out what I wanted to do, I wouldn't know where to look.

What fields are we, as journalists, qualified for that pays enough to live comfortably on while providing us with the satisfaction of enjoying what we do? Journalism jobs often fetch 100s of applicants. Are we going to have to compete with similar numbers of applicants elsewhere, with most of these applicants having degrees more suitable to the job at hand?

I don't even know where I'd go to apply for a job I think I could get. I took a job in a state I'm foreign to and would like to move back home. Even these government jobs sound tempting, but I don't even know how to go about picking out one I'm qualified for and one that I'd enjoy.

In short, I'm lost. And that's scary.

 

Yeah, at my first job, where I stayed for five years, I was already up to four weeks vacation a year, but they let us roll over as much vacation as we wanted, so I had so much comp time to burn that I don't think I used a single vacation day the whole time I was there... I got all of my vacation time in a fat lump sum when I left. That was a nice check to get.