{"id":48,"date":"2015-12-31T01:53:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T06:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/?p=48"},"modified":"2025-05-31T14:21:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T14:21:04","slug":"10-years-since-i-left-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/31\/10-years-since-i-left-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Years Since I Left Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"\">On December 30,&nbsp;2005, I finished up my shift on the sports design and copy desk, stepped&nbsp;out of the office building of <em>The Herald-Sun<\/em> shortly after midnight, and walked away from journalism &#8212; the career and craft that had been my calling since the summer between high school and college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">It has been 10 years since that night, and I have now spent more time out of journalism than I did in it. With each passing year, &#8220;journalist&#8221; or &#8220;ex-journalist&#8221; becomes a smaller part of my professional and personal identity. My journalism work has gone from the bulk of my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and portfolio to secondary entries. I no longer consider myself a refugee from a&nbsp;profession, but rather a proven&nbsp;practitioner in another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Here are some thoughts on life in and after&nbsp;journalism, with the benefit of a decade&#8217;s worth of hindsight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Do I have any regrets about leaving journalism?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">No, but I do regret having to leave journalism to be able to pursue the things that matter to me professionally and personally, such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">Working in a place\u00a0that puts me in position to succeed and to keep learning<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Working in a place committed to putting out\u00a0the best product it can<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Having some semblance of stability in my career<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Living where I want to live, not where my career dictates I must live<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Having a life outside of work, i.e., a personal identity separate from my professional identity<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">When I decided to leave journalism, I felt that while I could find some&nbsp;of these things in a job had I remained in the profession, I would not be able to find enough of them in any one job to keep me happy in journalism. Looking back 10 years later, I know&nbsp;I made the right move, and that makes me a bit sad because of&nbsp;what it says about journalism. The financial state of the journalism business was certainly a significant motivation to leave, but even if&nbsp;that wasn&#8217;t a factor, journalism is a tough&nbsp;mistress, and eventually I probably would have grown wary of its demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What do I think of the current state of journalism?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">There certainly does seem to be more enthusiasm now than a few years ago, thanks in part to a few splashy investments in the journalism business from tech barons and the rise of more experimentation. Still, so many of those seem to be happening in the same space &#8212; national and international news &#8212; while regional and local journalism operations continue to wither for the most part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">It&#8217;s an awesome time to study journalism and to do journalism. It&#8217;s a crappy&nbsp;time to do journalism as your primary means of making a living if you value anything remotely resembling stability in your career and life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poynter.org\/news\/mediawire\/336267\/do-the-stuff-that-scares-you-and-other-lessons-from-thunderdome\/\">this advice<\/a> from a former staff member of Digital First Media&#8217;s defunct Project Thunderdome:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"\">\u201cMy general advice, hard as it can be to hear, is to always be prepared for a layoff.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Look, I&#8217;m not looking&nbsp;to be in the same&nbsp;job for 20-plus years, but if you have&nbsp;the constant threat of layoffs hanging over your head, it is corrosive for your&nbsp;personal and professional well-being, however exciting the work may be. From where I&#8217;m standing right now, journalism looks like an exciting&nbsp;job&nbsp;and&nbsp;a lousy career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What life lessons have I learned since leaving journalism?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">There have been many, but most importantly, never close your mind to possibilities. When I walked away from journalism, I&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.john-zhu.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/17\/personal-announcement\/\">could not have foreseen<\/a> myself ending up in public relations&nbsp;(the &#8220;Dark Side&#8221; in journalist parlance) and actually finding&nbsp;it to be fulfilling work. Then, when I started in PR eight years ago, I never could have foreseen that I would one day do PR for Duke (the &#8220;Dark Side&#8221; for everyone who went to school at UNC). Life takes you to unexpected&nbsp;places, and when you get there, you discover unexpected things about those places, so don&#8217;t preemptively shut any doors for yourself with a &#8220;I will never &#8230;&#8221; mindset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How has my view of journalism changed since leaving the business?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">I am more convinced than ever that there is a vital\u00a0role for journalism in our society. Journalism, done properly, may be inconvenient to someone. It may even at times be inconvenient to me. I\u00a0would, however, accept the possibility of such an\u00a0annoyance\u00a0without a second thought, because for every instance\u00a0where journalism is a pain in my\u00a0rear, there&#8217;s an instance where\u00a0journalism serves\u00a0to watch my back.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">I have, however, noticed how much of the daily journalism output is just not that important (and sometimes just downright awful), and\u00a0I really wish journalists would stop trying\u00a0so hard to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattletimes.com\/business\/economy\/why-newspapers-matter-still\/\">claim\u00a0the moral high ground<\/a>.\u00a0That is probably what bothers me about the journalistic mindset more than anything &#8212; the profession&#8217;s attempt to wrap\u00a0everything\u00a0it does\u00a0in a\u00a0cloak of nobility. I can\u00a0probably make a decent case\u00a0that almost every job I&#8217;ve held since leaving journalism has contributed more to society\u00a0than\u00a0much of the\u00a0journalism that&#8217;s produced on a daily basis (that one job where I designed\u00a0catalogs for door knobs might be a close call).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">My other wish for journalism is that its practitioners would do a better job of living up to the\u00a0transparency standards\u00a0they set for others. The recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/latest-news\/article51453375.html\">reporting by the <em>Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/em><\/a> to expose the identity of its new owner, who tried to remain anonymous, was a fine example, but one all too rare. Far too often, when the uncomfortable lens of scrutiny is turned on themselves, journalism operations tend to clam up instead of embodying\u00a0the kind of transparency that they demand from\u00a0the institutions they cover. Journalism is as much an institution as any governmental body it covers, and journalism outlets, with the vast audiences they reach, wield significant power. Journalists\u00a0take pride in afflicting the powerful, but far too\u00a0frequently\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.poynter.org\/news\/mediawire\/391004\/new-york-times-public-editor-the-worst-job-in-journalism\/\">fail to live up to that credo<\/a> when they would be the ones\u00a0afflicted.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On December 30,&nbsp;2005, I finished up my shift on the sports design and copy desk, stepped&nbsp;out of the office building of The Herald-Sun shortly after midnight, and walked away from journalism &#8212; the career and craft that had been my calling since the summer between high school and college. It has been 10 years since&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/31\/10-years-since-i-left-journalism\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">10 Years Since I Left Journalism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":805,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journalism","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/exodus2.jpg?fit=1279%2C578&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnzhu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}