Dispatches from the real world
Last Friday, while I was for the first time interviewing for a job outside the insular world of newspapers, a man sat in the editor's chair at one of the United States' largest and most respected papers. He was a man who had three Pulitzer Prizes in his pocket. He had reached the pinnacle of his profession, and he had done so by being a tough reporter and a fair boss. Many young reporters cited him as a mentor, saying he had helped them develop the skills they need to do a difficult job, and do it very well.

Meanwhile, I was 100 miles from home on Friday morning, sitting in the lobby of a Courtyard Marriott next to a gas fireplace (totally unnecessary in Florida, even in January), talking to a guy about newspaper computer systems. The guy carries a Vice President-of-something-or-other for this small Danish company that is looking to gain a foothold in the fairly competitive market of newspaper publishing systems. This company's philosophy recognizes that the print newspaper is fast becoming a thing of the past, and its system purports to integrate the print side with the web side better than anybody else's system.

While we were sitting next to that unnecessary fireplace contemplating the future of newspapers, this editor up the coast had no particular reason to contemplate his own future. Being Jan. 2, it was likely he was ready to sweep away the debris of a particularly bad 2003 -- besides the big news that we all had to deal with, his paper had a short but ugly labor dispute, also. In that part of the country, it seems, labor disputes are always ugly. This editor's newspaper had been purchased a few years ago by a large, stridently anti-union corporation, and he was feeling pressure from the home office to get the profits back up to where they were before they made a few piddly concessions to the union.

The unnecessary fireplace crackled as the sun shone in the floor-to-ceiling windows. The VP-of-whatever asked me questions about my skills, my history, and my future desires. It's known that I haven't enjoyed my last few years as a journalist, and that I've been contemplating other avenues. Part of me really wants a regular job with regular hours, a job in which I don't live at the whims of whichever terrorist is in a bad mood that day. Part of me wants to try something completely new and different, something outside of the comfort zone I've spent all of my adult life -- and the last year or two of my adolescence -- building. It would involve some risk, certainly. The job involves a lot of travel, it would at some point sooner rather than later involve me moving the family 100 miles to the southwest, and perhaps most frightening, would involve something that I haven't been doing for the last 18 years. There's a chance I wouldn't know how to do it. I know how to do my current job, as well as anyone and better than most. In that, I have solid job security. To give that up in mid-career for something that brings with it not only the risk that I would suck at it but also the risk of being part of a volatile tech industry, well, some would say that's a questionable decision.

I have no Pulitzer Prizes; if I did, I could give you a solid guarantee that I would never be in a position where I would be fired from a newspaper. My current skills earn me respect from my co-workers; a Big Award of some sort would earn me respect from the industry at large. I'd be like this editor up the coast, sitting pretty at the helm of a large newspaper.

My conversation with the VP-of-Whatever went fairly well. He told me to expect a call in the next couple of days from the president of the company. We exchanged business cards and I headed back home, with 100 miles of road in front of me on which to contemplate my future.

As promised, on Monday, the president of the company did call. I was knocked off guard by the strictly-business attitude of the guy. He seemed to have little passion for publishing, or computers, or, really anything. He was a Businessman. I've spent years cultivating a deep contempt for Businessmen. Soulless assholes who care nothing more than making a buck, who hire people based only on what they can see on paper, who don't create anything. This guy came across on the phone as one of those people. He clucked-cluck at my lack of a college degree. He questioned my stated desire to not move immediately, noting that for a while, I'd have a Very Long Commute. He was calling from the home office in Maryland; we ended the conversation with him saying he'd be in Florida later this month, and we'd set up a face-to-face meeting then.

Roughly the time that phone in Maryland hung up, a newspaper editor elsewhere in Maryland was headed into his boss's office, a newspaper editor with credentials as solid as anybody's.

He walked out of that office with the unsteady gait of a man with a boot firmly planted in his ass.

The publisher cited her desire to have a "true partner" in explaining her decision to fire the man who had been her paper's editor since 2000, before her corporation bought the newspaper. She said this guy was an "excellent journalist, but our partnership was not where I wanted it to be in terms of where we can take the newsroom in the future."

In short: She didn't like the guy. So she shitcanned him. His replacement: The editor of the newspaper for which I work, owned by the same corporation. His departure was announced to us at a staff meeting at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. At 5 p.m. Tuesday, he was in the other newspaper, introducing himself to his new staff, which was less than pleased to meet him.

This means things will change at my place of employment very soon. The editor will lure people from our paper up the coast to work with him. A new editor will come in and change things to fit his or her needs. It likely won't affect me very much at all. It could affect me a lot.

I'm left wondering, though ... my concern was about job security at a small company in a volatile industry in which I have no real credentials.

Apparently, when it comes down to it, having rock-solid credentials at a large, stable company doesn't do you much good sometimes, either.