Out With a Whimper

I just took back an eight-pack of lithium AA batteries I'd bought for my digital recorder.

See, I used my digital recorder for my job as a reporter for an online hyperlocal news site.  Note tense: I'm not working as a reporter now. That's why I returned the batteries to the store.  I obviously didn't need them.  What else would I use a digital recorder for - to write my memoirs?

This blog post is a memento mori for my reporting career.  I mentioned that I'd lost my night job as a reporter this past spring.  Well,  I got another job as a reporter for a different online hyperlocal news site this past summer - in July, to be exact - covering public meetings in two towns, and I was going to mention that once I was secure in that new job.  And after three months, I thought I was.

Then my editor wrote me an e-mail to inform me that the new editor-in-chief of the site, which covers two towns, expressed a desire to cover public meetings in both towns - that is, what I'd been doing - in order to become more familiarized with everything going on. 

"Therefore," he told me, "I need you to NOT cover anything until such time as I ask you to do so in writing for a specific event or meeting. I will leave our agreement open so that as something comes up, we can react quickly."

What sort of a request is that?  "I need you to NOT cover anything"?

That was in late October, and I haven't heard from him since.  I'm repeating and directly quoting here what he said because I don't expect to.

So, the new editor-in-chief stole my job.  And I'm not getting it back.

Subsequent efforts at getting another media-related job - including applying for another reporting job in the franchise that owns the site I was just let go from - have failed.  The problem is that most media-related jobs n my area are in New York City and I can't afford the commute, and I have a part-time job I can't give up.  Also, there are practically no local news outlets - online or print - that are hiring.  Local news is my biggest strength - it may be my only strength. I'm now down to writing book reviews for a local site that promotes self-published books.

It's over. I'm not a reporter anymore.  I'm probably going to have to get a part-time low-wage job in some store or something like that, the sort of job that makes a mailroom position look like a step up.  

What really gets me is that this new editor-in-chief didn't have to take my job away.  After all, an editor-in-chief has several responsibilities that don't involve reporting, and this editor-in-chief could have easily become familiarized with the two towns covered by the site without freezing me out.  But no, this person obviously wanted to leave a big footprint on the site.  And that footprint ended up stomping me out.

Meanwhile, my old fellow college alumna Karen Hunter went on to pursue a career in journalism after college and has never looked back.  She has a nationwide radio show - a political talk show on Sirius XM, on, I've been led to understand, one of its most listened-to channels.   I'm happy for her, I really am.  (However, I still haven't forgiven her for mocking people who like classic rock.)  And the only reason I don't listen to her show is because I don't listen to talk radio.  I don't even listen to NPR anymore.  Why didn't I get as far as Karen did?   Some people have told me that as a black woman who went to a prestigious Catholic high school, Karen got a lot of breaks that I didn't, and that's why she's successful and I'm not.  No, that's not it.  Because, unless you go for a job at Essence, there's no such thing as black female privilege.  Karen probably had a better idea of where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do back when we were both in college, back in the 1980s, whereas I kept changing my mind about whether I wanted to go to graduate school or pursuing a career in journalism, publishing or broadcasting. Apart from journalism, which I didn't get into until 2011, I ended up doing none of those things, and now I'm nowhere.  She's just better than I am.  I'm simply not good enough to have gotten as far as she has.  There, I said it: I'm not good enough.

And, I know when to quit.

I don't want to say never, but, yeah, I'm probably never going back to journalism. I'm through. But while my reporting career may be over, I will still continue to blog here and elsewhere.  Because, just as I pretended to be a TV anchorman reading the news from a Scholastic magazine (with a piano bench as my desk) when I was ten or eleven, here I can still pretend to be a journalist.

Though, I never said this blog was meant to be a legitimate news source.

Anybody want to buy a digital recorder? :-(  Batteries not included.