Wednesday, July 1st, 2009...10:12 pm

Ending one journalism career, starting another

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Generally, this blog is about tips and strategies and theories on how to save and transform journalism. Today, I’ll be departing a bit from that to share some big news.

Here I am on my last day of work in a newsroom.

Here I am on my last day of work in a newsroom.

I’m unemployed.

No. I didn’t get laid off as so many of my fellow journalists have in the past year. Thankfully, I was able to leave my 20-year career in newspapers of my own accord with an exciting (to me) plan for the future. I’m heading back to school to get my Ph.D. with plans to  become a professor.

  • First: I will NOT be stopping this blog. So please continue to check Save the Media.
  • Second: I’m not giving up on journalism. In fact, I’m even more committed to this industry I love.

Here’s the story:

About 10 years ago, I got my master’s degree in public communications at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. I had 10 years of newspapering under my belt, so I picked the “academic” master’s, really having no idea what that meant. I earned it part time, one class per semester over five years.

I come from a family where no one has a graduate degree. My immigrant grandparents didn’t make it past 8th grade.  So I really had no sense when I started my master’s what academic research was. Then I started, and through the influence of some really smart professors, I fell in love with thinking. It opened my ideas that you could have a job where you get to think and figure out and explain and make sense of things. Wow!

So I vowed, I’d return in a few years and get my Ph.D. Then I got married, had two kids. A few years turned into 10, and finally I decided: If I’m going to this, it’s now or never. I applied, got a fellowship and will start classes this fall at Syracuse.

It was a tough decision to leave a good job, mid-recession, mid-40s, mid-journalism implosion.   Walking out of my newspaper office for the last time Tuesday, tears streamed down my cheeks as I passed the hallway wall filled with newspaper front pages, some from more than a century ago. I felt lucky that I got to choose to leave, but sad as well.

I’ve worked at newspapers since, well, I started working. So it’s odd to me that suddenly I don’t. But I still consider myself a journalist — I’ll just be doing it a different way.

In many ways my years in newspapers and particularly the past few years blogging lead me to my new path. This blog has emphasized to me how much I love to teach. Really, what is this blog but a teaching tool.

Blogging about blogging and interaction and tapping into communities has made me yearn to understand the online world better. I want to study how people, particularly women, interact on the Web and what sense of community that brings them and to what extent this access gives them a voice they cannot get through more traditional media.

I realize I’m committing to journalism at a time when the field is in flux. By the time I’m finished with my program (three years), j-schools may have dried up and blown away like so much newsprint, and I’ll end up a highly educated fry girl at the local fast-food joint.

Or j-schools will transform themselves as I’m urging newspapers to do, and we’ll end up with a form of journalism that is more robust, more interactive and serves readers better than what we had before.

I’m hoping for the second scenario.

I’m excited about my next chapter. I’m eager to see how my new experiences will shape my thinking about the future of media. And I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

(And, please, if you’re a journalism professor, keep me in mind. In three short years, I’ll need a job.)

– Gina

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