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Times are tough in my former occupation of print journalism. I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Atlanta in 2005 thinking, hey, they have newspapers in Georgia… I’ll just find another newspaper job there. Little did I know that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—the area’s biggest paper—was going to go through five rounds of layoffs over the next couple of years.
I even went so far as to accept an editing job at a weekly paper in a boondocks county until I sat down to do the paperwork and was told that, “um, yeah, about that salary… we can’t actually pay you what we said we’d pay you… we can only do about 75 percent of what we told you we’d pay.”
Thanks, but no thanks.
So, anyway, I know how hard it is for people running a dying industry to find new talent. It’s gotten so bad, this is an example—from the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune—of the classified ads editors are running to to lure new investigative reporters:
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[I]f you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.”
Read the whole ad at a few tasteful snaps.
I am not working in journalism now, but may get back to the fringes. I’ll let you know after I have a couple of meetings in NYC next month.
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