Is anybody else finding it hard to tear away from the biz?

Try UPS. Seriously. I always thought that'd be a cool guy. A friend of mine has worked for UPS for like 20 years or something crazy like that. Loves it.

 

They were hiring a few months ago up here and I chickened out.

 

I'm guessing those just starting out would work either butt early in the AM or the the early evening shift loading or unloading trucks. But hell, a year of that and you can start to work your way up the ladder.

 

I'm 37 and recently moved across the country to stay in the business. When it became apparent that I couldn't stay at my previous shop and still have a conscience, I looked into a few things -- including UPS and a return to working at a grocery store, which I did in high school and college. All of them would have required starting over and/or hours that were just as bad as the newspaper biz.

The bottom line for me is, working at a newspaper on deadline is what I do best, and in a better environment, it's what I like to do. Hopefully I've found that better environment; so far, so good.

One final comment to add to a great thread: the night/weekend hours issue is multiplied once you have school-age kids. Especially if you ever want to see them. While copy desk hours aren't great, at least they're regularly-scheduled hours that don't change much. You can schedule time with your family around them.

I feel very fortunate that I was able to shift from reporting/photography into editing/desk work about the time our second child was born. If that didn't happen, I may have been among the chorus of people who left this business.

 

Completely voluntary. Family was definitely part of it. It was difficult to plan any sort of future while doing this. But perhaps biggest was the strong desire to take on a new challenge. I have other interests, and wanted to pursue them. This had defined me for so, so long, it was in danger of becoming my life's work, and I knew that's not what I wanted.

 

So I wanted to revive this thread for mostly selfish reasons, as I now have an opportunity to leave the business after a couple of years of coming close in interviews with a few companies. The new job would be mostly a PR spot for a university, no sports involved, and comes complete with the better pay, better hours, less stress benefits that we journos wanting to leave seek out.

I just wanted to put this thread back out there to get more feedback from those who have left the business in the past couple of years who can give more perspective on what (if anything) they miss or what they've learned. And also for those of us close to making a transition to bounce ideas/concerns off one another. This thread was great when it was going good before, and hopefully it will be again.

 

I left the business for all of two months in 2007 to try teaching...

It was epic fail personified, and I found myself unemployed pretty soon. I was on unemployment for all of three weeks /[crossthread] and hated every second of it. I hated waking up in the morning with nothing to do and nowhere to be.

I was back in newspapers - as an ASE, on an understood track to the SE slot - within a month. My last foray out of the business, I'm thinking. I'm a lifer. It's what I do.

 

The thing is, whether you stay in the business, or go out of it, is not always up to you -- especially these days.

Unless you are doing the hiring, getting a job is two-way street. Both sides have to want it. What you want, or what you would have be your first choice, may not matter that much.

 

I'm on the fence. Up until this week, I was at a job that just didn't do it for me and convinced it was time to leave the field, go back to college and try something new. After all, I'm still somewhat young and have plenty of interests outside sports and journalism.

Then I got laid off, and all of a sudden things aren't so clear-cut. Going back to school is still an option, of course, but the paper where I worked previously -- the first place I've worked where they told me they valued me prior to my announcing my resignation -- wants me to come back. It would be a different position, one that would be far more challenging than SE and make me more marketable as a journalist in the long run, and I wouldn't have to take on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

It just feels like I'm at a point where I need to decide whether I'm as much of a lifer as I say I am or if I'm serious about getting out and pursuing these other interests.

 

Tearing away from the biz was the best professional decision I ever made.

 

Been out for five years. I have no desire to go back full-time, but ever since, I began doing play-by-play -- then started and now own my own Internet broadcast company -- stringing for the local paper and some others, and now I'm teaching journalism and re-discovering the passion I have for our craft.

I've been out five years and have worked practically every Friday night since.

A lot of people wonder why I'm so busy. I teach high school, coach basketball, broadcast games, string ... that's the pace of life I was used to as a FT reporter, and juggling a lot of balls at once is the life of a community journalist, so it's about all I know. Now, at least I get 10 weeks off in the summer in-between .

 

What I find interesting, crimsonace, is how many people I know who have left the newspaper business and gone into teaching. That's a route quite a few have taken.

Just goes to show we journalists really AREN'T about making lots of money!