I've enjoyed reading your advice column and found it very insightful. I'm hoping you'll help me out with a decision I need to make.
I've been at my current newspaper, a 55,000-daily circulation, for close to two years -- the most recent six months as a reporter, and the previous time as a copy editor. Before that, I freelanced for this paper and had an editorial internship at a very high-profile music magazine.
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My dream was always to be the old-school kind of reporter: government watchdog, secret sources, fantastic writing. But the paper I work for has me covering tons of busy towns and doing lots of pointless filler stories on bake sales. Editors expect 10 to 12 stories a week from me. I never have time to do cool enterprise stuff that would catapult me to a better paper, because spending time on that means I let my beat go, and that feels irresponsible. My editors don't teach me anything, despite my eagerness for feedback. And though I do try hard to improve on my own, I just feel frustrated, like I'm not gaining anything here. Sometimes the editors even introduce errors into my stories, due to sloppiness and basic incompetence.
So, needless to say, I've burned out. Going to work here now leaves me weary and frustrated.
I do have some solid clips, and I have won a good reputation for quality writing and serious reporting here. But it's not as good as I wish it were, mostly because of the intense output we're expected to maintain. I don't necessarily want to stay with newspapers. I'm just told this is the way to the magazines -- the whole trenches thing.
What I'd really like to do is leave my job to go live on an organic farm to recover my soul, my passion and my creativity. I envision nights spent reading Hemingway and Romenesko (wink, wink). Maybe I would even go to grad school for a degree in international relations, so that I can work for a better paper, covering more challenging topics.
So my question is this: Would leaving add up to career suicide in this job market? Or could it actually be a good move? Do I need to stick it out another six months (to get a solid year of reporting experience) before I make a move? If so, what can I do to survive?
Thanks in advance,
Losing my fire
You make this sound like a race between career suicide and professional homicide.
It's time for you to go.
I'd look at other newspapers or magazines, which are your ultimate goal, anyway.
This quota of a dozen stories a week seems to be creeping to larger and larger newspapers. I'd try for a significant jump -- 80,000 or more. The challenge will be pulling together a clip package that shows enough great work. You have already tried working with your editors, and they seem to be indifferent. Editors who ignore their staffs are in for high turnover, unnecessarily high costs to replace people, constant vacancies, overtime and a perpetual lack of knowledge about the community. This all shows up in the content, and lame content diminishes readership.
So, you'll be on your own as you try to carve out some quality time for good clips. I imagine you're already working way more hours than you should, so you'll have to make that time in your workweek by churning some of those bake sales and briefs a little faster to bank some time for good clips.
Don't worry that you've only been a reporter for six months. You've spent two years there. That's respectable. You've used the newspaper to bridge from editing to reporting, so your time certainly hasn't been wasted.
Now it's time to cross another bridge.
Coming Thursday: Once again, editors have come to this Asian-American reporter for
the annual Lunar Festival story. She'd like to see that assignment
passed around.
