My first job writing for a newspaper was just a way to make extra cash in between night shifts at the motel.
You could actually make a few bucks using those college essay skills. Who knew?
This was what they called stringer work. You’d get assignments and got paid by the column inch.
I covered high school sports and wrote a few features. Kinda fun. At first…
I interviewed a retired sheriff, one of those “back in my day” stories. I thought I did a pretty good write-up. A few days later I was sleeping it off after a shift at the motel.
My uncle came in and asked, “Lose a notebook?” and handed me a legal pad I didn’t even know was missing. I had left it at the old sheriff’s house. My blood ran cold. I’d been using it as a diary.
The newspaper folks had questions. The old sheriff saw “disturbing things” in my notebook. AKA, me talking about the time I smoked too much weed in college and some “Satanic” doodles of some alien monster I’d made up.
This was probably around 1990, right at the tail end of the Satanic Panic. Not so close to the tail in rural West Texas.
I promised myself I would never work for another newspaper. Ended up working in newspapers for 20 years.
I did keep another promise: Keep your work shit and personal shit separate!
Am I a bad dog owner or a team player if I let our dog pee on his arch-enemy’s bush?
Since he’s scared of other dogs and we can’t take him to the dog park where at best he acts like he’s in jail.
He has leash aggression and shows it by picking fights with other dogs, including the ones who could eat him for breakfast. He acts like he has a tuff, but we know different and so do they. So a little passive agressive peeing is about the only inter-species satisfaction he gets.
The other dog is also a shit-talker who can’t back it up either, so it seems like a fair pee fight to me.
Me, in the back of a friendly citizen’s pickup truck, about to cover a small town parade. I think growing a beard was a good move. Look at those chins…
I was so relieved to get out of print journalism, I burned my press card. The career of a lifetime, up in flames. (Actually just burned one corner. That shit stinks.)
All my friends had bailed. Corporate was making changes I just couldn’t stomach. I’d have less editorial control and I knew more layoffs were coming. I don’t know how I hung on so long.
But I do know why.
When it was good, it was so good — if you were cut out for it. We had a running joke in one place I worked, “I’m gonna move my car.” A cub reporter once went out to move her car on press day and never came back. Journalist isn’t just a job title. It’s an identity. One I tried hard to live up to for over 20 years.
Did I live up to it? Not always. But I tried.
I made a lot of friends and a lot of memories, but I also worked hard for not very much money, had to work weekends, nights and some holidays, had periods of great stress and loneliness. But I was hooked. You had to be.
At one newspaper we had a running joke. When things got rough in the newsroom somebody would say, “I’m gonna move my car!” A young reporter once went out to move her car and never came back. I admit I considered it a time or two.
Stressful as it was, there was nothing like the thrill of knowing you were the first to know. Even at a weekly or semi-weekly, you could scoop the dailies if you were good enough. At the very least you could have the best version.
Or the camaraderie you felt, all of us editorial folks working late so we could get a hot scoop into the next edition. We argued, told jokes in bad taste, had rubber band fights, threw paper wads at the ceiling fan. And we put out newspapers we were proud of. Then we’d race to the local bar and get trashed.
I wish I had appreciated it more. Eventually big box stores and the internet killed so many of our mom and pop advertisers, it was only a matter of time. I knew we were in trouble when the speaker at a convention tried to tell us our biggest competitor was the Yellow Pages.
They all found other jobs, one by one. Some saw the writing on the wall and found a job outside journalism. PR jobs, non-profits, state government. Others got laid off and their workloads fell on my shoulders. Press days got later and later. It sucked, but I kept convincing myself it would get better.
It was like trying to talk yourself out of a divorce you know is coming. I loved it once, maybe the magic would return. But deep down I knew better. I was getting too old for it and the outlook for journalism was grim.
I literally thought I was going to wind up homeless. I had a special backpack I planned to take on the road with me. Ultimately just would up using it as carry-on luggage.
I really miss the folks I worked with over the years. A bunch of crazy characters, yet creative and professional (most of ’em). None of the newspapers I worked for were big dailies, but I was proud of the issues we put out (most of ’em). Sometimes we even scooped the big city paper next door.
Late Boomer's Den 
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