Looking back on my last year in journalism, I’ve struggled to identify that turning point, that moment when I decided to give up what had been my lifelong passion and pursue another career. Was it when I registered for the LSAT last summer? When I spent hundreds of dollars on application fees to law schools last fall, or when I sent in a seat deposit this spring?
When did a hypothetical exploration of leaving journalism become my real life?
The answer lies not in the past year but all the way back in 2006, though I didn’t know it at the time. That was when The Baltimore Sun decided to close its remaining foreign bureaus. I remember it distinctly. I was sitting at my desk in the features section when the paper’s foreign editor, Robert Ruby, came by and asked me to step aside for a word. We walked over to a corridor and Robert told me the decision had just been made. “I wanted to tell you first,” he said, “because I was counting on you.”
Years before, I had told Robert of my interest in foreign reporting and asked him how best to prepare to apply for a foreign bureau. He recommended books to read. I read them. The bureaus were something special about The Baltimore Sun, a midsize paper in a blue-collar town, but one that always prided itself on hitting above its weight.
The closing of the bureaus – there were five when I got to the Sun, in 2001: London, Moscow, Jerusalem, Beijing and Johannesburg – was not on its own a major blow to foreign reporting or Baltimore residents. The Sun still got international stories from the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune (though the space in the paper devoted to foreign news seemed to shrink by the day). If I had been sent to, say, Beijing for three years, the world’s knowledge of China would have expanded very little.
But this isn’t about all those readers interested in foreign news, who can find it online. It’s about me, and, I would bet, many talented others who are discovering that they can no longer make a living doing what they love. There are exceptions, of course – people like 25-year-old New York Times sports reporter Michael Schmidt, who started as a clerk and worked his way up. But people like him get profiled in the New York Observer precisely because they are so rare. There are many others who once would have spent entire careers – happy, fulfilling, satisfying careers – at papers like the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe who now are leaving the business in their 20s and 30s. A whole generation, lost.
I would not be going to law school if newspapers were healthy, if I believed that journalism could support into the future a sizable group of people making a decent living doing it. Perhaps it was a happy accident that newspapers in the second half of the 20th century could employ a large professional workforce, could give people the means to buy decent homes in nice neighborhoods, send their kids to college and take pride in their work. I no longer believe that is the case.
But I also feel grateful that I experienced some of this golden age. I graduated from college in 1999, at a time when newspaper recruiters by the dozens came to campus to fill their growing newsrooms. I landed at the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., which quickly become ground zero of the 2000 presidential election. I jumped in with both feet. I remember standing next to Rick Bragg at 2:30 a.m. one morning as the Palm Beach Canvassing Board took a crucial vote on ballot-counting, and sharing a puddle-jumper to Tallahassee with Wolf Blitzer. Here I was, just a kid, playing with the big boys! Who could ask for a better career?
I moved on to Baltimore, and the Sun treated me better than I expected or deserved. I was sent to Colorado to cover wildfires, to California to cover gay marriage, to Boston for playoff and World Series games, to Mexico to write about immigration, and to New Orleans to witness Katrina. In those places, I wrote many of the stories I am most proud of, and I also filed voluminous expense reports. The paper never blinked.
Those days are over. Not just the limitless expense accounts, but the adventure of chasing a big story, of seeing places you haven’t seen before, of taking the time to live in a story and emerge with something special. Now, often frivolous stories are quickly spun out, based on a bare minimum of reporting, designed to drive hits. But they are ephemeral, forgotten before you’ve even clicked on to the next one.
When I started at the Baltimore Sun, in 2001, the newsroom staff numbered 420. Today it is about 140. In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes, “For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.” For a few wonderful years, so many people I loved and respected worked in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. Almost all of them have left, some voluntarily and some not.
Between the change in the nature of the job and the departure of so many friends, the Sun stopped being a fun place to work. I am filled with doubts about my next step. But I am excited to feel like once again I am the one controlling my destiny. Whatever happens next is on me.
-Steve
