“Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.” — Anatole France, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.”
Whenever I think of myself as a “worker” I have to smile.
Oh, sure, I have worked, for short stretches, whenever there was no suitable alternative available. Drug dealer. Janitor. Installer of storm windows and patio covers. Appliance deliveryman. Dishwasher. Schlepper of pizzas and sandwiches.
But I spent the bulk of my worklife scribbling silly-ass pictures and/or arranging words in some particular order with malicious intent, to wit, attempting to convey an idea to an invisible audience.
This is right up there with tagging freeway overpasses and howling at the moon. But it pays slightly better, and mostly you can do it in the shade, sitting down.
There is a game-show quality to journalism. Your team has to collect, confirm, compose, and condense a mind-boggling overabundance of information, then stuff as much of it as possible into a sack that keeps changing size until the buzzer sounds, heralding the start of that night’s press run.
If you beat the clock, you “win” and get to come back tomorrow to play another round.
The word “play” is used deliberately. There were some long hours spent shoveling, to be sure, but they were easy on the lower back and the calluses formed mostly on the mind.
If journalism truly was a game, for me it was the only one in whichever town I was inhabiting at the moment. Composing the first draft of history day in and out in the company of (mostly) like-minded maniacs.
The U.S. Navy used to sell itself by crooning, “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” Journalism’s pitch was that it wasn’t just a job, or even a game, but a Calling — to preach the Gospel daily in the Church of What’s Happening Now (tip of the stingy-brim to Flip Wilson and the Rev. Leroy).
Now, if you think you are Called to preach, you are easy to exploit. And the gods could be unimpressed and indifferent.
“Fine sermon, Reverend. But that was yesterday. What have you done for Me lately?”
So, yeah. Long hours, and you frequently took the Work home with you. Sometimes it dragged you in early, or on a day off. Often it took you someplace you didn’t want to go, not even for money. Especially when you considered the paucity of coins in your collection plate.
But the Work found me when I was teetering along one of those ragged edges that beckon to oddballs like me. And it kept me in bacon, beans, and beer for nearly 15 years, though I backslid to the edge from time to time.
Finally I decided I liked the edge and set up shop nearby. A small chapel, nothing serious. My sermons were unorthodox, but so was the congregation. Same old gods, but hey, whaddaya gonna do? I dodged their lightning and kept that shtick up for 30 years.
Fortune eluded me, but I got all the low-rent fame I could handle, more than I deserved. God’s honest truth? I got lucky. In the right place at the right time, with friends in high places, and more than once, too.
Could a 20-year-old stoner with zero skills wander into the smaller of two daily papers in a medium-size city today and set his wandering feet upon a path that kept him out of jail for nearly a half-century?
Never fucking happen, to coin a phrase. There are no more two-newspaper towns, and damn few newspapers, period. Most are the journalistic equivalent of dollar stores, all owned by the same two or three outfits, all selling the same two-bit expired horseshit. And magazines are following them down the Highway to Hell, which is no longer paved with good intentions.
In 2023 the 20-year-old me couldn’t even go back to selling weed, because that’s just another job now. And you know how I feel about jobs.
I once was lost, but I was found. Can I get a hallelujah?
Mad Blog Media 
hallelujah!
Amen, brother, amen.
Ye asketh for it…
Fuckest thou with the Bull and thou shalt surely get the Horn. That’s Scripture!
The movie was pretty darn good, too.
https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/hallelujah
PO’G: Gotta ask, myself being one of far, far left bell curve literary creativity. Do you sense one of your creative journalism tsunamis coming on (as in today) or do you just sit at the keyboard and the magic syllables flow forth? Inspiration or perspiration? Carrot or stick?
Regardless, today’s is a “keeper”! I just loved the way you circled back on the “labor/job” theme! Tip of the sombrero, chapeau, and bike helmet! 🙂
Thanks, JD. I appreciate the attaboy.
If I have a process, it usually involves juggling a lot of random notions and hoping that when they all come crashing down something is spelled out in the rubble. Sometimes it feels like working a Ouija board. I’m not always running the show, is what.
In this instance, I wanted to write something about Labor Day, so I went rooting around the Innertubes looking for interesting information but didn’t really find much — lots of contradictory notions about whether unions and wages are up or down, a few historical pieces about capitalists using coppers to roust strikers, the usual holiday fare.
I got off to a couple false starts and then finally wrote a sentence I liked, the first one, which we call the “lede”:
If I can get that footing poured, I have a chance of building something. Sometimes it’s not the first sentence but the last, or maybe some middle-of-the-rant linchpin that ties the room together like The Dude’s rug.
In this instance, I’m riffing on the old saw, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” In this case, the job chose me, and I was lucky enough to grab its ears and hang on for 45 years.
The game-show imagery may have been triggered by Jimmy Buffett’s death. Remember “Door Number Three?”
The bit about journalism being a Calling is something my colleagues and I have talked about at any number of publications in any number of places. If you feel as though you just have to do something you are at the bosses’ mercy, a hose from which you do not want to drink.
And the rest of it was mostly the Truth, or how I see it/feel about things, in any case. I was lucky. I enjoyed the Work, mostly. And I got out of newspapers and magazines before they got turned into ATMs for vulture capitalists.
I beat the clock, is what. All I had to do was find the words to say so, and Lord, do I ever have a lot of those rattling around in the old brain-box.
PO’G, you does have a way with words! As someone who delivered a weekly diatribe every Sunday morning for almost 40 years, I understand your comment about “what have you done for me lately.” That is the down side.
The up side is that when you deliver something about which even you failed to understand what you were talking about, you get another chance next Sunday.
May not work that way in the newspaper business.
Bruce! Good to see you. You worked for a tougher Boss than I did. And even if you changed locations, why, there He was, same as at the other place. Many franchises, one Owner.
I, with a new boss every few years, had a chance of pulling the wool over his or her eyes … for a while, anyway.
But we didn’t get to wait until next Sunday to deliver. We had to do it every day. It was the sort of fresh start that Sisyphus would’ve understood if he ever got a break from rolling his rock.
It would be a hoot to get a behind the scenes look at a modern newspaper. I’ve never been inside the Coloradoan building, but I drive by it all the time, and at random times of the day, and there are never any cars in the lot. (We have doctors and dentists on that street, and usually go by it on the way home after hockey.)
You’ve done writing, editing, pixel wrangling, etc … and I wonder how many of those jobs are just gone. Not outsourced, not done by robots … just not done, period. If I can get through two articles in the NYT without seeing a typo, I’m amazed. And when I help my kids with research for their homework, it’s shocking just how bad the web is these days. Before the threat, I mean, promise of AI, we went through a decade where media sources were hiring *writers* based on their keyboard words per minute, not their contributions to human discourse. Pick a random event from US history, something appropriate for an average middle schooler, and read the first ten hits that Google serves up. If nine of them aren’t garbage, I’ll eat my SPF 50 hat.
The best days of the web are surely behind us, and the written word might be going with it.
It would be a hoot to visit a modern newspaper. I don’t think I’ve been in one since the early Nineties, when we fled Fanta Se for Bibleburg and I did a little contract work for my old buddy Richard Springfield at The Gazette.
I only ever worked for small or medium-sized dailies, starting in 1974 at the Colorado Springs Sun and ending in 1991 with The New Mexican. The Sun is no longer with us — it was murdered in cold blood by The Gazette, when the G was still owned by the Freedom Newspapers chain — but The New Mexican remains very much with us, and — ¡que milagro! — it is still a family-owned operation, as is the Albuquerque Journal.
Back in the Seventies and into the Eighties and early Nineties, it took a huge number of people to put out the daily paper, even at the smallish outfits that fucked up and hired me.
You’d have an executive editor or editor-in-chief at the top of the newsroom food chain; a managing editor next step down; a city editor with an assistant or two; editors who oversaw various sections (sports, lifestyles, business, opinion, etc.); a copy desk that edited all local and wire-service news, wrote headlines, sized photos and wrote captions, laid out pages, and oversaw composition (a.k.a. “the backshop”); and a thundering herd of reporters, columnists, and photographers (maybe even a cartoonist).
Reporters filed copy with the city desk, where it might get scanned by the city editor followed by a hard content edit from an assistant city editor. Next it went to the copy desk, where the news editor would give it a look and pass it to a copy editor (rim rat), who’d give it a nuts-and-bolts edit, heavy on spelling, grammar, style, usage, etc. The rim rat would kick it to the slot man, who might sand a bit here, buff a bit there, then kick it to the composing room to be set into type.
Typesetters used to rock hot-lead Linotypes, and you could get another read out of those guys because they were skilled craftsmen. Once everything went “cold type” (computerized) you might benefit from another set of eyeballs on that keyboard jockey. The crew pasting up your pages could catch something, and when the page proofs went back to the copy desk they might find something else.
The press run was the last chance to catch anything outlandishly wrong, and sometimes we did.
That was then, this is now. When Hal and I worked at The Pueblo Chieftain in the early Eighties we had more people on the copy desk than they have in the entire newsroom now. It was a family-run operation when we were there; Gannett has it now, as as they do The Coloradoan.
Copy editors were the first to go, and it shows, everywhere. Without cracking a sweat I can find something on almost any page in any newspaper that would have gotten me thrown out of my newswriting class at the University of Northern Colorado. The prof was a veteran of the Dayton Daily News and he was ruthless. Reminded me of the gunny in “Full Metal Jacket,” a DI striving ruthlessly to weed out all the non-hackers who did not pack the gear to serve in his beloved corps.
The kids got into some of their mom’s old tools from her manual lay-out days. She did newspaper ads and brochures for a real estate company. Kind of amazing it and of itself. It was a small mom and pop shop, doing commercial real estate, but they had someone in house making try-fold brochures and whatnot. Full time. After that she was at AlphaGraphics for a spell, doing the same basic thing.
Now she designs beer cans, and has had the opportunity to do some hard goods (a fleece jacket that flew off the shelves) and some interiors for sponsored events. And it’s all from her desk, in the home office, staring at a screen.
Transitioned from 3D work to make 2D products, and now she’s doing 2D work to make 3D products.
But kids today start out on screens, and that’s where they have trouble. They’ve done web pages and posters and instagram memes, but they’ve never printed anything that has to go on a window or into a shopping cart. So when she tries to explain why they have to fly to Cincinnati to watch the aluminum and cardboard come off the print press, and then color correct with their eyeballs instead of typing in a hex code and hoping for the best, they look at her like she’s explaining making fire with a bow drill.
Sigh. It’s all different now. Newspapers don’t even have their own presses anymore. The New Mexican prints the Albuquerque Journal. Also, the Durango Herald. The Pueblo Chieftain and The Gazette are printed at The Denver Post. Now that the Chieftain no longer runs a printing operation, a bunch of smaller regional papers that used to depend on the Pueblo folks are hunting for presses. So it goes.
In my day a newspaper would print a rival’s paper for them, but only if the rival’s printing press went sideways and couldn’t be fixed in time to print the next edition. Professional courtesy. The favor would be returned when the shoe was on the other foot.
You are really on a roll today, O’G. Sounded like some similarities: “…So, yeah. Long hours, and you frequently took the Work home with you. Sometimes it dragged you in early, or on a day off. Often it took you someplace you didn’t want to go, not even for money. Especially when you considered the paucity of coins in your collection plate….”
Only place my profession ever took me that I really didn’t want to go was the auditor’s office at a nearby Federal facility. Fortunately, all the faults they found were due to the Federal Facility constantly moving the goalposts. I even brought an assistant along who threw (almost literally) the paper trail at them.
Otherwise, yep to the long hours and scant shekels, at least in the University ashram. The nice part about my lab in Hawaii was it was air filtered and air conditioned, so when my allergies got bad, I farted around longer than usual in the Clean Lab. Bouncing alongside a pod of dolphins in a Zodiac also passed for work, as did drinking beer while sitting at a water filled quarry in Minnesota. As my colleague John Sinton would say, “they actually pay me to do this?”
All came to a screeching halt when I took a job in the Bomb Factory. Those days when people left me alone in my set of labs were great, but there was always A Manager who knew better than I how to do something. I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel and indeed, it was the 20 year pension mark and not the train.
Feels good. Le Bombe Factorie actually asked me to come back a few hours a week as so many of us retired that no one could remember what we were doing, so that’s play money. Now, where did I see that nice set of bikey wheels.
Oh, and BTW, Rob and Charlies just got sold as Charlie finally retired. Bought by another bike geek, though, not by some vulture capitalist.
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/business/rob-and-charlies-bike-shop-passes-on-to-new-owner/article_5711e0da-3881-11ee-a7f5-4733d99df568.html
Gracias, hombre. How are you liking this lending of hands a couple hours a week? One of Herself’s colleagues was invited to do something similar, but she doesn’t think she’ll go for it. I’m not certain I would, either, even for wheels money. I kinda like being off the reservation.
At least you lab rats have had something like a sane career trajectory. Mine was more like a bottle rocket flipped skyward with a lit fuse and its stick broken off.
Meanwhile, Rob & Charlies is sold? ¡Chale! Is Stephen Newhall still there? Have you met the new owner yet?
I emailed Stephen asking him if he was still there but have not heard anything back. I just saw that article today. I’ll probably pedal my ass over there in the next couple days and say howdy. Today was too nice a day so I got home from LANL and blasted around the northern roads for a bit.
The few hours is to help write a classification guide for something that didn’t quite fit any of the existing ones. What I like about the few hours a week is it does exercise my brain a little about a program that I really enjoyed working on as a lab rat, and I really like the people in the group I last worked with. It was a welcome relief from the knife-always-close-to-the-back in my old Chemistry job.
Say hi to Stephen for me if you see him. And please present my compliments to the new commanding officer.
I hear you on the brain-exercise thing. It’s why I bang away at the blog. Got to shovel some of the shit out of my skull before it stinks.
I do miss having deadlines, though. They were always the accelerant for a brisk Dumpster fire in the back of some poor sod’s magazine.
Deadlines are good. I never worked well without deadlines. Lighting a fire under my ass always made a hot beeline to my brain, which shows you which organs were closely attached.
The Word Wrangler once again has served us a gem! The post makes you think, smile, and cuss, sometimes all at once. Chapeau.
Thank you, sir. “Think, smile, and cuss, sometimes all at once.” It’s all I’ve ever asked.
Got out ahead of the law indeed! Think of all the angst you avoided while the furniture in journalism was rearranged. Or I should say trashed..
Wonder if you ever got red-hot mad when you were writing for the Trades if something you submitted got cut or “corrected” and then printed without you seeing prior? I dearly loved some of your pithy observations in BRAIN. But nowadays you’d have to wear a disguise and pull the shades as there are those sensitive ones out there that would come a lookin’ for ye.
Oh, for sure. An editor once fucked with my lede on a column and completely changed its meaning. They could hear my screams on the International Space Station after that one.
But I’ve done it, too. I did a sloppy edit of a short-tempered reporter’s story once and it took some real fast talking to stop him from tearing off my head and shitting down my neck.
And he really was a Gunny in his youth.
Great reminder to find balance in work and play.
You offer a gracious perspective of your chosen profession. It is indeed sad that the primary keystone of that profession has changed. Apparently the future will involve AI guidance to insure proper communication between us. Without it there likely will be a lot of miscommunication errors – “No I didn’t say “he spiked the punch”, I said “He spiced the punch”. Perhaps the task of maintaining proper language and grammar use will be something managed by only a few, and then only as a supportive and studied subject. Maybe our future will involve a lot of the grunts and zug zugs a la Caveman.
As for laboring, I would like to say that during short stints of my life that it could be said that I worked. But I do not feel as though I’ve done nearly as much as others. Yeah, I’ve dug ditches, pulled stumps by hand, cleaned out kitchen grease traps, shoveled snow during blizzards, worked a warm Texas summer in a refinery cleaning up pookey in a paper suit and unloaded freight from trucks by hand on the graveyard shift, but I’ve also had the benefit of a lot of backside cushion warming jobs where the results of my efforts may not have always paid for the polish used on the larger mahogany desk upstairs.
Thus, When Labor Day comes around, I do not think of myself as one of those that it honors, but on that day I do think of those who are working. I thanked at least one worker this year for working on Labor Day.
I hope that whatever labor you now perform, that it is done when you want, where you want and with the effort you wish to do it. I for one will seek to appreciate this thought, as I contemplate the ever-growing lawn out front, the peeling paint from the shack I reside in, the leaking power steering pump on my run-down jalopy, and the pleasurable heat that will be emitted from the new furnace or heat pump that I yet need to install in the earlier mentioned shack. Yep, labor is a fine thing. Now where’s my coffee cup.