Fifteen Years Past ‘30’
It was 15 years ago this week that I was fired by the Winston-Salem Journal as senior editor. It was my “30” for being a journalist (“30” was the code number placed at the bottom of the final page of typewritten stories in days gone by to signal editors and typesetters that this was the last page).
Though it took only a couple of months for me to find a new job and begin an eight-year run in communications and marketing, being fired hurt for a long time. It hurt even though I knew deep in my heart that A) the specific action against me was unjust and B) leaving journalism was the right thing at the right time.
Today, as a clinical mental health counselor, I often mention my experience when I discuss how certain moments in life can be transformational. Of course you never know something will necessarily be one of those moments until some time in the future.
In my case, I knew things were going to go against me at the Journal because the paper’s HR team, which was in my corner, gave me a heads up. Unfortunately for me, the newsroom’s managing editor, who had gotten the job I wanted months earlier, had complete power and needed someone loyal to her as No. 2.
When the day of my firing came, I packed up my stuff under watch of security, was able to dash off a heartfelt goodbye email to my staff and left the newsroom for the last time.
I’d long anticipated that I wasn’t going to finish my working career in journalism, which had begun in 1981. The decline of newspapers dates to the internet’s arrival in 1995 and the subsequent devastating loss of advertising revenue—retail and classified—that had always fueled newspaper staffing.
The industry gave away its product for free on rapidly created websites. That model especially could not sustain smaller regional papers as more and more folks got on the web. They simply fired up their computers at the breakfast table and read the news for free, rather than open the print product and get ink all over their fingers. Fewer readers means ad rates must come down. Less revenue means less money to pay staff, hence layoffs.
Today, newspapers, even the local ones, have largely converted to pay-for-play sites, but it took too long to get there; the income stream from online newspapers is much smaller and staffing levels are pitiful at most newspapers. The Journal, which had 105 newsroom employees when I began there inn 2002, appears to be down to about a dozen now.
The decline of newspaper staffing has been an unending cycle for more than a generation. Why it matters, in case you don’t realize, is that journalists keep a check on the spending of public money by reporting on government actions. Smaller staffs mean elected officials operate with less scrutiny. Sound familiar? It’s not just happening on a national level, by the way.
As for me, the move to communications and marketing kept me earning a paycheck, but as I tell my clients today in talking about transformational moments, I knew it was not spiritually satisfying work.
I began to consider what else I might do with the remaining years of my working life and in 2016 entered the online master’s degree program for counseling at Wake Forest University. I became a counselor in September 2019 and have found a level of satisfaction in this work greater than days of a “big scoop” in journalism.
Given the industry shrinkage even further since I left, I know I am profoundly lucky to have been fired by the Journal. I still had enough working years left to try on one career (communications and marketing) and land in another (counseling) that will take me to retirement. Which, given how much I love my work, I know will be in the distant future.
For that I have gratitude.
The managing editor who engineered my firing in January 2011 wound up herself being cut loose when the Journal was sold about three years later and the new owner wanted its person in charge. So to my final managing editor, wherever you are, I thank you and I forgive you.