A new chapter in the personal saga of Steve

I’ve been up here in North Dakota for two-plus years now, and doing OK.

I just got my second consecutive first and second-place awards from the North Dakota Newspaper Association Better Newspapers Contest for government reporting and reporting, in the category of newspapers less than 12,000 circulation. I also got a substantial raise, the largest ever given in one step I’m told.

I celebrated by resigning last month.

I have a few reasons (one of them a point of principle which nobody’s going to care about next month, I’m a journalist, not a hatchet man) but the time seemed right.

I had a young twerp of an editor (not the editor who hired me) who is a perfect specimen of his generation’s educational accomplishments. He recently “clarified” one of my op-eds, altering a sentence to identify Neville Chamberlain as prime minister – of Czechoslovakia.

(Just consider the level of ignorance that implies. One, not knowing anything about the history of World War II. Two, not realizing that there is no way “Neville Chamberlain” is a Slavic name. Weirdly, the guy is not the least bit embarrassed by his abyssmal ignorance. Worse, I fear this ignorance is not too uncommon among college-educated people of his generation. Worst of all, you can graduate from journalism school not knowing who Neville Chamberlain was – much less what he means to the history of the 20th century.)

I was contemplating what an unpleasant place to work our newroom had become. Doubly painful considering how much I used to enjoy coming to work every morning. And it occured to me the chances of moving up were not good.

The first thing that struck me was, two years at a small community newspaper is experience at an entry level job. If I’m still there in five years, it spells “loser” on a job ap. Make no mistake, I loved working at a community newspaper but while I can get better at the job the one thing I can’t do is raise the population of our county. (Twenty percent larger than the state of Rhode Island, population about 12,000.)

The next thing I thought was, the job market is currently full with far more experienced journalists laid off from the larger papers. And, I’ve topped out income-wise. I fully understand why, but the newspaper is never going to be able to pay me much more than they are now. And frankly, it’s not enough to support us. We’ve only been able to live on my salary because we have other sources of income.

And, while news writing is great practice, doing it for a living is taking away from the kind of writing and research I want to do.

I had an interview in Minot two weeks ago, so we made a camping trip out of it. My wife was not thrilled, she loves this little town and wants to graduate from our local university. (Go figure. She grew up in her country’s capitol, a city of two million, and attended a university older than the United States. She loves this university.)

As we were driving back through the countryside I thought of a plan that will allow us to stay here.

On Monday I’m starting truck driving school.

It’s a little far ahead for definite plans, but “have laptop – will travel.” I’ve been looking over the audio courses available from The Teaching Company and ordered one on music theory – something I’ve always wanted to know more about.

Open road here I come!

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9 Responses to A new chapter in the personal saga of Steve

  1. Pingback: dustbury.com » We’ve learned our lesson well

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