Journalism is Messed Up

When I left my job at The Daily Newspaper For This Area, I kind of wondered if I would ever work for a newspaper ever again. After all, I was leaving for a reason. Lots of reasons. Some of them were money reasons and some of them were "this job finds a way to take up more of my time while making me increasingly miserable" things.

Anyway, I sold out. I took the money. I went to the dark side.

It didn't take long for me to start working at newspaper(s) again. In fact, I wonder if I write more for them now than I did when I worked there. It seems like every month, I have even more work from them. And the weirdest thing is, they don't mind paying me now all the money they didn't want to give me then.

Now newspapers all over the country are failing and I can't see why everybody is so shocked. I mean, outside of the newspaper industry, nobody seems to care about newspapers. Even the idea that all the people are online is absurd, though a lot of readers have moved in that direction. The truth is, lots of people just don't read the news or watch it on TV or give a shit about what is going on. At all.

Which is why I don't really write news. They have reporters for that. I write horoscopes (and maybe more horoscopes, if The Daily Newspaper For This Area agrees to my monetary demands) and feature articles about things they never would have let me write when I actually worked for a newspaper full-time.

I'm starting to think that the reason all these plum assignments go to people outside the industry -- people who sold out and left -- is because the people who are still at the papers think the people who left must be smarter than those who stayed.

It's ridiculous, of course. Plenty of smart people work at newspapers. Why they haven't left, I don't know. I'm sure some people still suffer from "integrity" and "scruples." But when it all comes crashing down, they'll find new and better jobs, the kinds with set hours and responsibilities. And I will have to find a new way to pad my paycheck than writing horoscopes and stories about eating varmints.

*This post was written in response to Dr. Wife complaining that I haven't updated my blog. So nyeah.