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.

Malaise

I suppose if I looked hard enough at the daily news - Trump, tariffs, the Women's World Cup - I could find something to talk about here . . . but I'm in sort of a funk right now, and I don't mean I'm feeling like Bootsy Collins.  I feel more like Phil Collins . . . when he's singing a ballad.

I've had some bad breaks this past month, along with the return of a problem that I thought I'd licked, and I'm too emotionally exhausted to go into details about them.  Besides, I've learned the hard way that talking about your personal problems online is not a healthy way to deal with them (and learning is the only thing you should ever do the easy way).  Suffice to say that I feel utterly uninspired when it comes to writing anything, and it may be awhile before I write anything of substance for awhile.

Nevertheless I'll try to solider on with this blog, just as I have or nearly seventeen years, and try to find something to inspire me to write about it . . . or maybe I'll write more about the lack of inspiration I'm feeling.    I will say that, due to a sudden change of fortune I have to put my professional writing career on ice for awhile and figure out what I'm going to do next.  Hopefully, I'll figure something out in due time.  But for now, expect me to post here less often.  

Funny Business

When I was a kid in the '70s, I had different ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up. At one point I wanted to be a carpenter, because I lived in a subdivision where there was always a house going up every other week or so, and building things looked like a fun job. Later, I wanted to be a highway builder - the guy who maps out and designs the highways. I mentioned that once on this blog. Needless to say, I pursued neither career . . . and I'm glad I didn't. We don't need any more subdivisions and highways in America.

Anyway, I more or less decided on some kind of career involving writing when I was in my teens. But what kind of writing? I suggested to my mother and sister that I could be a comedy writer.

My sister replied, "You'll starve!" Not very encouraging.

I still entertained the idea for awhile . . . until one weekend evening when we were returning from a family outing at the Jersey Shore. In the back seat of the car with my sister, I was tossing out ideas for "Saturday Night Live"-type skits to my sister to see what she thought. She grew vocally exasperated. From the front of the car, my mother said, "Steve - stop bothering your sister!"

That was the last time I ever considered becoming a comedy writer. Ultimately, I became a news writer, and, on this blog, I decided that I would comment on the news of the day and do so in straight fashion. No jokes. Just tell it like it is.

My writing has never been funnier.

P.S. I recently watched a whole episode of "Saturday Night Live." I only chuckled once or twice through the whole ninety minutes. I'm sorry the mothers of the writing staff didn't tell their kids to be quiet when they were considering comedy sketch writing as a career.

Greatly Diminishing Expectations

I haven't talked about myself much on this blog of late; I don't like to, really, but I have to get a few things off my chest. There's a lot in the news I feel a need to comment on, and I will do that, so I'll be as brief as possible. Which might not be brief enough.

It's been eighteen months since I left my last full-time job, a temporary assignment, and when I left, I hoped to use my open-ended down time to pursue various writing projects, all of which have pretty much flopped. I mentioned back in July a profile article idea I had to scrub when the person I wanted to write about proved to be impossible to find and I did not get nay help form the one person who could have helped me; well, a profile article idea I had pursued before that also went nowhere, and I'd had to abandon that as well. While I tried to pursue other ideas after that, I have not bothered to attempt profile articles since.

I did finish a play. Now if only I could find a way to produce it.

As for the other ideas? Well, I did manage to submit a couple of articles to Patch.com's Montclair, New Jersey site. I provided links to both pieces back in August. It looked like I had a nice little sideline. Instead, my experience with Patch.com's Montclair site proved to be as much as dead end as my experience with the Millburn site, which I'd written one article for. A third piece - a straight reporting job - fell apart for reasons that boiled down to a disagreement with an editor over a copy problem. Although I attended an informal meeting of Patch writers held by the chief editor to stay in the editors' good graces - forfeiting a chance to meet a Facebook friend from Massachusetts who was in the area for only that one day - I haven't had anything published by Patch.com's Montclair site since. A human interest story I wrote for and submitted to the site last week was not published, and so that appears to be the end of it.

At the time of my earlier pieces being published, I wrote, "Maybe things are looking up. . . ." This wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.

I also started writing flash fiction stories placing children in surreal settings. One had two five-year-olds tricycling across the country; another had a pair of grade-school-aged brothers arguing about French cinema. Yeah, I've pretty much lost my desire to pursue that idea, and for several reasons that are too random and complicated to explain here. Let's just say it's a bad time to pursue it. Also pretty much done to the point you can stick a fork in it is a blogging workshop service I tried to start. I didn't drum up any business, two people who were initially interested in personal tutoring lost interest, and my last workshop for the writer's group I belong to was such a disaster due to technical difficulties, I don't have much of a desire to have it again any time soon. If I'm asked to lead such a workshop, I will, but I won't pursue it.

And while the termination of my MySpace page earlier this month has little to do with my actual writing, it does fit a pattern of pulling plugs. So does the editing I'd been doing for a Web site, which that's gone sour as well. Another copyediting opportunity more recently fell through.

Meanwhile, the job market continues to suck. I thought I'd be working again by now, and with my writing "career" in even greater disarray, I have to turn my attention to looking harder to find employment, despite the fact that there's only one job for every five people out of work. So it looks like my writing is, indefinitely down to one thing.

You're reading it - this blog.

So stay tuned. I'm not going anywhere. Just like the rest of my writing isn't. Back with more musings later.