When to call it quits?

It might be a good choice for some people. My brother left his job to go to law school a decade ago, took on $100k worth of debt, worked as an attorney for 8 years, left that job last summer and seems to have no clue what he wants right now. Yet he still has a giant mountain of debt and no real gameplan. Is it worth it? Not to me. But others may be different and that's fine.

 

Very good post. Since most of us don't get into journalism for the money, once the job stops being enjoyable/bareable, there's no reason to stay in.

Honestly, I felt worse on the layoff days when I survived than I did on the day when I was finally cut loose. When you're busting your ass to do a job and working crazy hours and you know, deep down, that there is nothing you can do that will give you job security, that sucks the life out of you.

 

Everyone has a breaking point. I left my job as a sports editor eight years ago. Because of the economy and a period where I was looking for a job -- any job -- I had a short relapse at THE worst newsroom I have ever encountered. That lasted about eight months and ended about four years ago. I still have difficulty going to bed before midnight. At 10:30, I still think, OK, it's crunch time. There is still nothing that gets me going like a Friday night football game (I don’t need the money, but I still string games). I am the one Dad at a Little League game who can say, "No, the ump got it right, our guy was out." If I go to a game at our local A-ball stadium, I think about what the guy covering the game is going to write and about how tight things are going to be for him on deadline. You don’t ever turn this stuff off. The breaking point, though, was a final one. It was obvious. In the middle of my seventh year as a Sports Editor, I reached a point where the daily ration of crap I had to wade through to get to the parts of the job I loved became too thick. I looked around at other opportunities and had some nice ones, but for the first time, moving to a new, bigger, better place just wasn’t exciting.

It has been a long eight years since that day. I went back to school, learned some new skills, and got a great job before I was even done with my schooling. Then I got laid off along with a staff of about 120. That was a good thing, because I hated the "great job" anyway. I worked a series of jobs with low pay and awful hours so I could work at getting more new job skills and am finally in a good place with both my work and remuneration.

Making the switch for me was not easy. It was painful for me and the people who live with me. It took a long time to get things right, but it had to happen. There came a point where things just had to change.

Having the perfect plan when you move on might be possible for some people. Perfect or not, it's smart to take whatever steps are available to prepare yourself for the move while you're still getting a regular check. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're asking the question about when it's time, you are probably on your way to being there. Still, when that time comes you'll know it.

When you don’t get excited walking into your newsroom, you know. When you break A1 news during a slot shift and still make deadline, you should be able to call that a good day. If you can’t, you know. When deciding which of the fresh-from-college kids you’re going to hire stops being fun and becomes a chore, you know. When you avoid your daily chat with the one guy who finally believed in you enough to give you the job you spent the first 15 years of your career working for because you’re afraid of what you might say, you know. When it’s time to go, it won’t be an elephant in the room. It will be a whole mess of elephants.

 

No disrespect to your brother, but sometimes you have to see things through... If I had $100K in school loan debt, that might have been enough to think twice about not bailing on your job, at least not until most of that debt was gone.

 

My breaking point came a few months before I got the axe. I was covering an event three hours from where I live. I had to cover events on Friday and Sunday and my oldest son's first birthday was Saturday. There was no news to cover on Saturday, and we had three other reporters at the event. I asked my assigning editor if I could drive home on my own dime for my kid's birthday. He said, "Get an off-day story in the can, and of course you can."

My SE then vetoed it. I called him on it and he said, "You know how many of my kids' bithdays I've missed?" like it was some badge of honor. It was also especially annoying, because the event I was covering did not fall under my regular beat and I had a very strange situation at my last job where I had a contract where I was not supposed to cover anything other than my beat (NFL and NFL related). I was asked to go to additional events all the time and I always said yes.

About a week before the event, I was in the office and one of the secretaries said, "Oh, isn't your son going to be 1 soon?" and I said, "Yeah, I can see him on that day if (dickhead SE) will let me drive up and back on Saturday and the SE finally relented. He reminded me that I might not be so lucky in the future...

That was when I kind of accepted the fact that if my future wasn't going to be as a sportswriter, that it might not necessarily be a bad thing...

 

Oh, I agree. He's always been that way, which is why it was a HORRIBLE decision to make that great of an investment.

 

Mizzou, if I may ask, on that Saturday between the events you were covering, was that an off day for you or were you technically still 'working' and required to be there in case something happened (even with three other reporters on site)?

Because if it was the former and had been me, I'd have never even asked permission. On an off day I'll do whatever the hell I want.

And proclaiming the "do you know how many birthdays/holidays/events I've missed" as the badge of honor is a shitty way of being a manager. We do miss events, but holding that up as some virtuous thing is BS. Good managers say 'Hell yeah, it's your kid's birthday.'

 

We had four reporters at the event. Only the beat writer was even going to the arena on the Saturday. Everybody else had stories in the can. We were off... I know two of the other reporters went to an amusement park that day... I was off... Yeah, I shouldn't have asked, but I honestly never thought for a second that I would be told no...

 

Your SE was a dick.

 

That was the understatement of the century.

 

Man, I want to give a big thanks to Gator for starting this thread and everyone else who has given feedback. This has been EXTREMELY helpful and eye-opening.

As a recent college graduate, I am in the job search phase, and these last few weeks have really heated up. When I first chose journalism as a major, I knew I didn't want to get involved with newspapers for several reasons.

For some odd reason, I convinced myself a few months ago that my first job was almost undoubtedly going to be with a newspaper. It seemed like that's where everyone started, so I guess that's where I have to start too, right? Wrong! Almost all of the top-of-the-line sports journalists today started with newspapers decades ago because they had to. There was nothing else!

I am totally reevaluating my job hunt. If I get an offer from either of my two recent newspaper job interviews, I don't think I can accept. The industry is dying, and there's no denying it. On top of that, it sounds like so many people are/were miserable with their newspaper jobs.

There are so many other jobs that WE are all qualified for. Just do a simple search on a job website with the keyword "journalism" and see how many results come up that ask for a bachelor's degree in journalism or related fields. Media relations, public relations, social media managers/directors, professional/college sports teams communication/digital staff members and more.

Luckily, I am at an extremely flexible stage of my life (no wife, kids, debt), and after reading this thread, I think I am going to save myself from the future question of, "When should I get out of the newspaper industry?" The way it's looking now, I might just avoid that headache from the start.

 

I would just like to point out that I do not believe the industry is dying.

It is going through a major upheaval. People will always want news in whatever format is the fashion.

People didn't stop getting mail when the last pony express pony went belly up.