I suppose I should be raving about what’s happening to The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and just about every other newspaper or magazine in this misbegotten country.
But hey, if we’re going to be dumb enough to elect a venomous orange man-baby as the Pestilence of the Benighted Snakes — twice! — I guess we deserve to be pig-ign’ant of what he’s doing, too.
Anyway, the only thing raving about shitty newspapers ever got me was an invitation — more than one, actually — to leave the one I was raving about and drag my surly ass off to some other shitty newspaper, posthaste, s’il vous plaît, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, etc. I managed my final escape from The New Mexican in 1991, one step ahead of the publisher’s spike heel, and that was that.
You regulars know the story. I had joined that paper in 1988 as a copy editor, then cycled (har de har har) through a number of gigs — assistant sports editor, assistant features editor, and finally features editor, doing a little cartooning and cycling reportage on the side — before taking it on the Jesse Owens in ‘91 to do as a freelancer what pretty much every Damon Runyon character did on Broadway, to wit: “the best he can, which is an occupation that is greatly overcrowded at all times. …”
Boy howdy.
Still, 15 years of newspapering set me up pretty well for freelancing, because while I wasn’t exactly great at anything, I had learned to be OK at a number of things: writing hard news, soft features, and commentary (and fast, too); editing other people’s work and proofing pages; drawing cartoons and taking photos. I would try just about any old thing for any old crook who could spell my name right on a check and remember to mail it while I could still remember what I did to earn it.
So there I was, just doing the best I could and plenty of it, because freelancing paid less than newspaper work, and the kind of newspapers that would hire a hairy pain in the ass like Your Humble Narrator didn’t pay shit. If you wanted to get a raise, you had to move to another newspaper, and without being kicked, too.
Or maybe that was just me.
Happily, freelancers basically pioneered the concept of “remote work,” which kept my pain from manifesting itself daily in various editors’ asses. For a while, anyway. I developed a long reach. Nevertheless, I managed to log 30 years as a freelancer, twice the time I spent raving my way through a half-dozen Western dailies and one weekly outfit, and only had to move four times.
And newspapers taught me how.
I liked newspaper work, when I wasn’t hating it. The people were smart, except for the ones who weren’t, and you could try your hand at damn near anything unless you wanted to get paid more for it, in which case nix. The shift was basically hours of fuck-all peppered with seconds of cardiac arrest and/or stroke and we had to remake the entire fucking product every fucking day.
And no do-overs. Once your mistakes were off the press and soiling the readers’ greedy little paws they were yours forever, like misspelled tattoos.
God, it was fun. Except when it wasn’t. But sometimes even then, too. Plus it fed and housed me for 15 years, and set me up for the next three decades.
So fuck Jeff Bezos anyway.
Mad Blog Media 