Able to walk away -- and the reason you did

I got out for a lot of the same reasons as most people. I wanted better pay, better hours, more job stability, and more marketability/versatility to move from job to job (I definitely detected a "stigma" attached to a sports writing career).

One way I depart from many of the rest of you is that I don't really miss the deadline part of it at all. In fact, two other reasons that I left: (1) Constant deadline pressure. No time to do the kind of in-depth writing and reporting that I would want to do because there was always another deadline looming; (2) Not able to just write and report. Just too many desk duties. Too many live chats. Too many mailbags. Too much Twitter.

If I had it all to do over again, I would put every egg I have into the investigative news reporter basket, and at least give it about 5-10 years to see if I could make it to the top. I'd go to Northwestern or Missouri. I'd go to Columbia. I would pursue top internships. I would stay far, far, far away from sports. Too far to see with the strongest of telscopes.

If I could land a job like that now, in fact, for comparable pay, I would leave what I'm doing in a second. But I don't know that those jobs really exist any more, where someone can just spend weeks and months turning a story and/or an issue inside and out, sending out FOIAs, digging into numbers and documents, etc., etc. It kills me. The window is so short to decide what you want to do in this business and go for it. I hate that I picked the wrong path. But so is life. I'm doing well.

 

If I could find a job that pays the same or nearly so, I'd be gone fast and don't think I'd miss it.

I love working for newspapers and can handle the crummy hours and all, but screw the constant threat of furloughs or layoffs always around the next corner.

Problem is, it's all I've ever done.

Don't really see the sense of going after another newspaper job (well, maybe at The Plain Dealer) but applying for communications or technical writing or marketing or proposal writing or whatever other kinds of jobs you are likely competing against folks who have actual experience doing that very thing.

I don't think most hiring folks really have a grasp of what sports writers and editors do and you have to get past that.

 

Many reasons for walking away: Bad treatment. Tired of suffering fools on a daily basis. Tired of hearing the same excuses for sloppy mistakes and bad writing.

All of that hit home at the last place a few years ago when I saw people sending pages without making the marked corrections or turning in stories and ignoring the editor comments.

I was able to walk away because I had run out of patience, and I had the courage to walk.

There are still people who push that stigma, though. I think it applies on sort of a bell-curve basis. I knew people who were in the business, but they never tried very hard, and they never pushed for changes. They are borderline sellouts.

The people at the other ends are not sellouts. They are the ones who wised up after a number of years and left, and they are the ones who knew to run away before they ever started.

 

This is why, once I began doing less freelancing, I determined that if I was going to make a change, it was likely to be a wholesale one.

I am currently doing something totally outside the realm of newspapers, and, at this point, that is at least partly by choice. Sure, I've applied for newspaper jobs -- many of them, in fact, in places all over the country and at papers of a variety of sizes and types -- over the past couple of years.

I haven't landed one of those gigs, however, and so, I've turned to other avenues that, if they pan out, will take me in totally new directions, rather than being fields that are different-but-related-and-not-what-I really-want in comparison to what I've always done before.

For me, there has definitely been a feeling of, "If I'm not going to work in newspapers, then I'd rather do something in which I'd get a totally fresh start."

 

Don't sell yourself as a sports writer. Sell yourself as someone who can gather information from a wide variety of sources, determine the most relevant information quickly and summarize or analyze it concisely and accurately. That's a pretty marketable skill set in any number of fields. Even most college graduates struggle to write well (I know, I've graded their papers).

One ex-sportswriter I know took a job doing PR for a hospital. His first assignment: a routine profile of a cardiologist. He talked to the cardiologist, a colleague and a couple of patients. He turned in his story in two hours.

Said his boss: "Oh, we thought this would take you a week to do."

 

One of the casualties of all the staff cuts are these type of jobs. Good investigative reporting takes time, but we're all too damn busy cranking out 15 inches on the city council meeting or the local basketball game, plus doing a few pages.

 

You have two things going for you:
1) You probably make less now than entry-level jobs in technical writing and PR.
2) Your idea of working on deadline is exponentially different than theirs. Once you prove you're faster and more accurate than people from those fields, you'll become indispensible and be able to get plenty of experience.

Newspaper experience translates perfectly to all writing and editing fields where you're expected to turn business-speak or tech-speak into plain language. The key appears to be, in my experience, to find a hiring manager who actually knows this. They are out there, particularly with the number of journalists who have gone on to other fields lately.

 

For my first child, I had just gotten the job, and I didn't feel too comfortable about taking too much time off, even though my supervisors were all "We've been there, take as much time as you want." Including time to be with my wife in labor, I took 3 full days and then came in to work a couple of half-days.

Second child, I said, "To hell with it," when it came time to take off. Used up a bunch of vacation time and took off three straight weeks, without any fuss.

 

I worked for about four years for a weekly community edition of a Top 50 daily before moving to the sports desk to cover preps plus whatever else was thrown my way. (Sailing? Sure. Small colleges? You bet. Indoor soccer? Why not?) I left after about a year not because I hated the job, but the pressure it was putting on my personal life.

I was living with my GF (now my wife) at the time, and she was working a 9-5 job. We were ships passing in the night - I would drag myself into bed around 2 a.m. (after putting the paper to bed, working on other stories and going to Denny's or The Pantry to unwind) and get up around noon. We would try to make lunch dates, but realistically the only time I would see her was on weekends (and even that was spotty).

At the end of the day, I saw how many other editors/writers were divorced or never married and decided that was a bad, bad sign. I still miss a lot about being in a newsroom on deadline, but being in my mid-20s and having to make that choice at the time, it was the right one to make. I've kept my sanity and personal life intact, even if there's a tinge of regret about what my career path might have been if I had stayed. (Then again, I still see half of the writers I came up with at the same jobs with the same paper 10 years later, so maybe I'm getting misty-eyed for no good reason.)

I went into PR (tech, which was great when the bubble was growing and not so good after the bubble burst) before settling into marketing communications. It's a steady gig and all I need to worry about is writing - no media pitching or the other icky parts of PR.

I've also managed to dip my toe back into the sports journalism waters again - during a period after a layoff a few years ago, I started doing freelance work (MLS games and auto racing along with preps stuff). I have a good relationship with one of the SoCal papers to do sprint car coverage of their races, and I pick up other work for papers in California. I also write for online sites and do some magazine writing on motorsports.

Ultimately, it's worked out well - I can choose my spots and stay involved in sports writing but have the stability of a "normal" job. I guess on some level, I'm one of those dreaded amateur/citizen/online/idiot journalists that a lot of full-time writers loathe; at the same time, I have the background to actually be a reporter when I cover things and not a fanboy who doesn't know not to clap in the press box or high-five a driver after a race. Believe me, a lot of the stuff that my "colleagues" write on some of the sites I contribute for makes me have teh sads LOLZ.

 

I'd like to walk away (at least from this job and this area) but I don't know what the hell I could do even though everyone that's posted before me has successfully transitioned.

 

i got out in 2003. went to law school. i've been a lawyer since 2007. throughout my three mostly miserable years in law school i wished i was back in journalism. felt the same way at my first law firm job, which sucked. got luck and found a good law firm job in january 2008. now i'm a partner at a six-person firm with hopefully a lot of growth potential. there are good days and bad days like with any other career. litigating is stressful. i make more than i ever made as a journalist but not nearly as much as you'd think a lawyer in a top 10 market earns.

but the main thing is that ever since i got a job i enjoyed, i never once wished i was back in newspapers and i stopped identifying with a journalist. my wife, who is still in journalism, talks the same way i did about how newspapers are so important and i've somehow morphed into a typical reader. i definitely consume the news but i'd be fine if the paper stopped being tossed on our driveway every morning. (i wouldn't tell the wife that though ;D)

 

Just got out three months ago. I'm in my late 20's and had a really good career going. I didn't have plans to move up to bigger papers, but I had built a great brand in our market and was moving up within the paper/company. But the lifestyle demands were wearing on my wife and me, and once we have kids I knew that would really be an issue. I didn't have a raise in three years, and I also had designs on more civic involvement that might become a conflict of interest. So I had some definite outside factors that weighed on me.

I took a marketing job in higher education, and I couldn't be happier. I do miss the people I covered and "being in the know" but the lifestyle is awesome for my family. I've already been able to plug into more things at my church and in my community, and I got a pay raise with real holidays off. The job expectations are also incredibly reasonable, and my deadline experience has made my new employers' requests pretty manageable when they say they need 500 words of content by the end of the week. The attitude in the workplace is so much more positive, too, considering all the beatings newsrooms have taken with job losses.

So, the change has worked out very well for me.