I was the news editor of smaller of the two sister papers from 2003-2006, when I was pushed out by the IT manager (offsite at the other paper). Life conspired to keep me in town, as my fiancee was wrapping her undergrad. I got laid off the next year because the next place I worked shut down. I was able to quickly find a temporary position out of state via networking, but after signing a six-month lease, that job evaporated in only 10 weeks. Next job ran five months before layoffs were threatened, prompting me to find a position at a small weekly in the town I wanted to retire in but turned out to be nominally editorial but functionally advertising, leading to my first panic attack and resignation.
Owing to a lot of other shit happening, I wasn’t in a position worth even putting on a resume for 14 months. On the other end of that was 19 months at the local paper where I’d landed, cut short because I decided a 50% raise to go into marketing was worth the ethical costs (and would return me to where I’d started in 2003). I only had to endure that for 10 months, when our three-year contract was terminated. I quickly found work at an audiobook publisher, but nine months into that, I walked out from a dressing down from my boss, on the production floor, for doing what I’d been told to do (and not in a malicious-compliance sort of way).
A couple months later, a SWAT team rousted my family from our hotel room Christmas Eve, and to my wife’s surprise, before we got to the ground floor, I’d dialed the batphone at the paper. After being a source on A1 for the Christmas edition, I figured I had nothing to lose by emailing the editor. The old IT guy was gone, and they were looking for a part-time, temporary copyeditor ahead of the desk being shipped off to Texas, so I started the new year working across from the city ed from back in the day.
I did not follow my job at first, as it was a pay cut in a far more expensive city, but after nine months of fruitless searching, I got back in touch and took the job here, which I had three roles at over nearly five years.
So I’m seriously considering removing several of the intervening positions and stretching both stints to paper over both the gaps and the instability itself, as there’s no one to call to verify when I worked there. Being midcareer, it’s hard enough to get past software gatekeepers in the first place, but seven mostly nonconsecutive positions in as many years can’t be helping my score.
The two main wrinkles I can foresee are a wholesale refactor of my LinkedIn could be a red flag, and the most basic of background reports would place me in two other states before remote journalism work was a thing.
I don’t like the idea of lying on my resume, but what I’m doing now isn’t working.
Are there other risks I’m not considering? I’d love some stability going forward, but I’m not going to expect any job to last long enough that this could stymie a promotion.
Ok you have lots of good info, but you can fuck right off with your “peak earning years being wasted” bullshit.
We’re at 40 years and counting of wage stagnation. If I’m not at peak earning, it’s not my fucking fault. I’m not the one who spent my life voting to make the rich richer and fuck over the common person. I’m not the one passing legislation that suppresses wages. I’m not the billionaire bankrolling politicians to give the rich tax breaks.
For literally decades, all the most powerful people in society have been conspiring together to fuck people like me.
And now I get to listen to some cunt tell me it’s my fault because I wasted my time? Fuck off.
I did not mean to guilt trip anyone. Nor am I spinning some “personal responsibility” conservative Boomer shit. Everything that you say is absolutely true.
But the reality is that those are peak earnings decades and the fact that the economy is an utterly unjust dumpster fire and 100% of the fault for that lies at the feet of rich conservative old people and idiots who get conned into voting against their own best interests, doesn’t make that not true… And also doesn’t change that being old and broke is gonna suck balls.
That’s just meant to be a motivator. It is for me, I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am (which is not nearly as well as I want to be) without that exact motivator + the fact that I have a family that depends on me.
You’re saying if his life sucks later its going to be his fault.
That’s literally guilt tripping.
No. I am encouraging him to do everything he can to proactively make his life NOT suck later. Those aren’t the same thing, but it sounds like you have an ax to grind. I get it, I have a similar ax but I have to wonder if this ax is really serving you or are you just impotently angry at a world that gives zero fucks?
I don’t think your ax is with me. I empathize with your position, The last thing I want is to guilt anyone. And reality is not your, not my, and not OPs fault. We don’t have to like reality, but we do have to deal with it. Now the reality is that we live in a system that will reward us for maximizing our peak earning years and punish us for not doing so. I want to be clear that I am not a fan of this system. Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t change the system, and sticking your head in the sand and yelling at people that try to pull it out isn’t helpful for anything.
Yes.
And by extension you are implying that if his life does suck, it’s because of what he did or didn’t do.
My axe is with you, because youre expressing the same attitude of blame that you’re simultaneously trying to denounce. You can’t have it both ways.
Your premise is that using reality to encourage people to do the hard things that they need to do is a kind of violence?
I think I’m done with you.
Enjoy your axe. I hope it keeps you warm at night.
Regarding wage stagnation. I do not disagree. That however does not change the basics of managing ones carrier. OP is trying to work in a dying field. Really questionable if that is a good idea. We have family that are writers and they have had similar issues to OP. The way to get paid well is to either be a specialist preffereably in short supply, be management, own your own business, or be in a union. Working in a growing not a dying industry is important too.
I should have been more specific that when I left Gannett, I was done with corporate journalism. I’m not against the field as a whole, but the job insecurity is just mayo on the shit sandwich of selling entertainment as news. The thing is, finding jobs through negative filters really doesn’t narrow things down.
On the plus side, I’ve never had any interest in writing what someone else wants me to write. It’s hard to start off as a columnist and then get news assignments.