For the ex-journalists here...

1. What do you miss most about sports journalism?
The rush of a good story. The idea that, every day, my coworkers and I put out a tangible product -- you could look at it at the end of the day and say, "That's what we did today," for better or worse. The camaraderie of the profession.

2. What do you miss least?
All the things a corporation does to make you feel like less of a human and more like a commodity: low pay, slashed benefits, wage freezes. I would have stayed in the business if I could have afforded it.

3. What do you do now?
I went back to school and got my master's degree. Now I teach journalism writing classes as a faculty member at a decently sized public university.

4. Are you happier with your new career?
Depends on how you define happiness. I always wanted to be a sports journalist, and a big part of me misses that. But I don't think I will ever get back into it full-time. I've got a great job now, and even though teaching doesn't really have that day-to-day satisfaction or the adrenaline rushes of journalism, I'm finding little things I like about teaching that let me know I made the right decision.

 

I hope to contribute to this thread soon. I'm just marking it so I don't forget about it, but I'm sure I know what I will and will not miss.

 

1. What do you miss most about sports journalism?
Those rare nights when I get to watch an amazing game/performance and then get to tell people about it through writing. Coming in ahead of deadline and taking those five or so minutes to take a deep breath and enjoy the high of writing under pressure.

2. What do you miss least?
The crap pay, the lost weekends, the lack of upward progression, the feeling that most of what I write doesn't matter anyway.

3. What do you do now?
I write marketing material for a children's hospital.

4. Are you happier with your new career?
Considerably, even though I have to tuck my shirt in every day now.

 

Think this is a great thread, but I'm wondering if there should be an addendum to whether you chose to leave the field or was it a matter of necessity (laid off, move, etc.). Wondering if the way someone leaves affects how they view their current situation. Or I could be completely full of crap. Or both. I have a friend who chose to leave in a fit of frustration and the grass wasn't greener. Have another who was forced to leave and made his peace with it and moved on to better things.

 

1. What do you miss most about sports journalism?
2. What do you miss least?
3. What do you do now?
4. Are you happier with your new career?

1. The other writers. Having a clue about hockey.

2. I was freelance (had a different journalism job by day) and I don't miss the hit-and-miss aspect of that.

3. I'm a month into an AmeriCorps gig, doing communications and information gathering for flood relief. It's still a lot of research and writing.

4. I'm not in a career job yet; I'm still in security clearance for the foreign service. Hopefully, by this time next year, I am running an embassy. But in the meantime, I am far more fulfilled in this job than I was in either my 10-year journalism work and my 10-year sports writing worlds (which ran concurrently). And I have a supervisor who, on a daily basis, says "you're awesome," which has never happened in ANY job I've held -- which transcends journalism. (I'm not exaggerating. It's 11 a.m. as I write this, and my supervisor has already told me this once today.)

 

I will say this... As much as I love my current job, it doesn't exactly give me the stories to tell that my last one did...

But any profession where you have to live in constant fear of losing your job is not one I want to be in... Granted, no job is perfect and plenty of professions have layoffs, but at most places it doesn't hang over your head like it does in journalism.

 

1. The hardest part is that I'm still in the same community, so I regularly see the paper and think, "Here's how I would have done it." I was the sports editor there for nine years, so it takes a while to completely let go of a section you ran for that long.
2. The travel to high school playoff games and ridiculously late Friday nights during football season. The low pay for a lot of work, and the feeling that all that effort was never going to be enough to satisfy anyone.
3. In January I started working media relations for a small local college.
4. Absolutely. Better pay and a far better working environment. We get a ridiculous amount of vacation time, I'm already slated to receive a raise in September and my bosses have told me several times to let them know if I start to feel burned out. I have a hard time explaining to them that what I'm doing is far less hectic than my previous position.

Anyone who is looking to get out of newspapers, I recommend finding a marketing / media relations job at a small college or juco. The skills that were taken for granted at my old job (speedy, accurate writing; photography skills; page design skills; organization) make my new employers giddy.

 

Chose to leave. A year or so prior I'd mentioned to the local college's marketing & media relations director that if anything ever opened up I'd be interested. A job came open, he called me during my lunch break to let me know and I sent him my resume the same afternoon.

 

Officially, I took a buyout, but I was laid off. The paper actually ran an article that said we all took buyouts so it made it look like we left on our own. That so pissed me off.

 

One thing this thread is reminding me of, and it was something that I sensed from people who had left the paper before me and put my faith in when I decided to leave, is that not one person has said they were not happier in their new fields. Most say they are tremendously happier. Food for thought as anyone wonders what they'd ever do without newspapering.

 

Good addendum.

I quasi-chose to leave.

I resigned on good terms from the paper I was at, because I could not sustain myself on what I was making and couldn't stand smalltown living anymore. I didn't want to spend my 20s in Podunk. I fled back to my college town, where I had family and friends who I missed and who I could crash with for awhile while I sorted things out. I had some interviews lined up with a couple papers already, but jobs didn't materialize. It was 2008 and a crappy time to be looking for reporting gigs.

I did a lot of interviewing over my three months of (somewhat unanticipated but voluntarily) unemployment, and three of those positions were frozen before they'd finished the interview process. I found that pretty telling. I did get an offer, but it was for another Podunk job, 1,000 miles away with no moving expenses paid, for about what I'd been making at the job I'd fled. Nope!

I'd started applying for non-j jobs in the city, got an offer and took it. I had it in the back of my mind that this might be a temporary situation until the media industry stabilized. Then two years passed and I realized I was relatively happy, and newspapers were still a mess. I'm not saying I plan on doing this forever, but I'm never going back in any full-time capacity.

So I was not consciously looking to bail on journalism entirely but I knew it wasn't outside the realm of possibility, and when the opportunity presented itself I took it very quickly.