the navel times and observer

I took the job. I had a conversation this morning with my editor about leaving the Globe for the Lebanon Daily Record and she informed me that the last two error or so published in the newspaper were someone forgiven because she knew I was looking at other job opportunities. Thus the case at hand. I have two recorded reprimands, two strikes, against me which means if I get a third error published in the newspaper my ass is in the Dumpster.

My editor told me they'd rather not fire me and wasn't trying to get rid of me, which I believe, but then that same day told a friend of mine and a Globe intern that should she want to take a job full time mine was available. I felt that was more than a little uncalled for, to more or less begin divying up my posessions while not only is my corpse not yet cold, but still live and in the building!

In any case, yes. I took the job. I will be a Daily Record reporter and sometime editor beginning April 11. I'm not terribly excited about the job, but I'm looking forward to not having a job where I continually need to worry about coming in one day to find the editors giving me flowers and telling me they hate to let me go.

Thus I am a lame duck reporter. The motivation to really try to dig in and expand coverage of my beat? Gone. I mean the returns are slim to none. I'm still going to go to work every day (that is, unless I can pull off a couple vacation, personal or sick days before I go. Honestly I'd rather not try to stress the relationship I have with my editors). But in any case I wouldn't take one off until after the election on the 4th. I can't wait to cover the election.

This election, ladies and gentlemen, could determine if a former Jasper mayor, a write-in candidate for an alderman seat, could possibly get that seat despite being a write-in candidate. This, my friends, means he might possibly sit on a city council at the same table as the current mayor this guy slugged at the beginning of the month. It would be great to see how a guy does in the election when he has a court date just a week later for an assault charge against the mayor the town he's trying to represent.

It should be a good night. And I won't miss it. I might try to swing a day off afterward. I mean my editor said she needs her reporters Friday, but then I'd be leaving that same day so where's the motivation to hang around as long as it's not gonna hurt me in a future reference? Ciao.

Today when I went ahead and called to thank the Lebanon Daily Record for their time and the interview I got a bit of a surprise: An offer.

So, for $500 more than I'm making right now I could go to Lebanon and write about, well, that has yet to be determined, and help edit and design the newspaper on Fridays and Saturdays. This would significantly adjust my weekend schedule from a Saturday-Sunday weekend to a Sunday-Monday weekend. No big loss there and my Saturday shifts start about 2 p.m., which gives me time to sleep in.

Thing is, I'm not particularly sure I want to leave Joplin. Now, if you asked me this morning what I'd like to do if given the option I'd have probably accepted. Probably for lack of sleep (I'd hate to think I'm no longer capable of faking being a morning person) I would have told you what I felt. I didn't want to go to work today and I wasn't particularly confident I would make it to the end of another work day. Well, we made it to the end of another work day, It wasn't too terrible and I finished my stories, though unfortunately two editors have since called to either add things or answer questions in the story.

But even with that last sinker of an addition the day didn't go badly. I could use more days like that and its days like that which make me think that I might actually be able to make it here at the Globe (*cue Mary Tyler Moore music). I also don't want to leave because I feel like I've been given a hell of an opportunity to really make something for myself when a professor stepped in this summer and hooked me up with the interview that got me this job.

It's an opportunity I'm not ready to just let slip away.

Which is not to say I lied when I told the Daily Record I wanted somewhere where I felt comfortable to begin building up for a bigger career. I don't feel confident at the Globe. I've called friends and loved ones in tears sometimes because I've been stressed out over small errors after being warned about my corrections. I obsess over my stories and it's no secret because most of the time I feel like I'm not far from getting thrown out on my rear. I mean the Globe's fired someone in the time I've been here, sorta casts a real dour light on things.

I'm also pretty lonely down here, I don't have friends in Joplin outside of my coworkers and I'm not very close to even them. That would be one thing nicer about Lebanon, it's half an hour from my grandparents, 50 minutes from Springfield, closer to St. Louis and only 2 hours from Columbia.

I dunno, I'm really not sure what I'm going to do but it's nice to know there's another door open, at least for the time being. I keep feeling like if I leave I'll regret something about having left Joplin. Like there was something in Joplin I just couldn't do, a goal I couldn't meet and leaving would be admitting that failure.

I mean it's not like I'd be leaving Joplin for bigger and better things. While the editing experience would be a new skill and a big step for me Lebanon is a small newspaper with a smaller market than the Globe. It's leaving an area (Joplin and its closest associated communities) of about 80,000 for a town of 12,000 people. A 7-day daily taking itself very seriously for a 6-day daily focusing intently on the local community.

Which is not to say I think Lebanon would be a permanent change. Not in the least. At the moment I still want to try to move on to bigger and more substantial papers. My aspirations do not include anything like the New York Times or the Washington Post (Lord knows I don't have a chance in hell of getting that far) but there are certainly smaller newspapers to consider that are in towns of even higher than Joplin's prominence on life's grand scale.

For all that I have in Joplin if I leave it would very likely be for good. Joplin's been good to me, it'd be absolutely miserably pitiful to have only worked anywhere only 7 months, but overall it's not a bad community. Really not a bad place to live and I'm glad I got to know it as well as I did. But it's not a market I can imagine really putting any effort into re-entering, though I feel like leaving the Globe on these terms there is a possibility that they might hire me back or at least I can count on them for recommendations.

Essentially I just don't know. My thoughts on my abilities to do this job change with the weather. Is that a way to live? Will I automatically be better when I get to Lebanon? I doubt it. How on Earth did I ever manage to convince two professional journalists to offer me jobs? Is there something else I should be doing? That thought scares me. Do I have the skills to do anything other than walk in a straight line? The thought has crossed my mind.

The latest: I have a job interview Monday with the Lebanon Daily Record. I'm not sure I'll even be offered the job (it involves some design/editing work and I have only very very little experience in that field). I've also had some problems with errors in the last two newspapers I've worked for. On the other hand, I've also gotten some pretty good clips from the last two newspapers I've worked for and I have experience reporting in small town southwest Missouri. I'm also willing to do anything they ask, I somewhat know my way around a camera and I'm not afraid to work the miserable pisant hours of the day (I do that already even if I don't put it on my timesheet and after all, what else am I going to do? social life? what?).

The upsides: from what I've heard from the editor the position: part education reporter, part Sunday editor, part stagecoach shotgun rider (if Lenny's sick) pays better than my wages right now, at least $500 per year more. At least for a little while I might end up living with my grandparents 30 miles away from the newspaper and I imagine at this point I'd try to find a place to live in their town largely to have loved ones nearby, that's definitely been missing from my life these last 7 months. Maybe they'd even let me help them out with housework and yardwork. And grandma's a much better cook than I.

Downsides: I'm not sure that a smaller daily would be any less stress than a bigger one. I mean the workload would probably still be there, even if the push for the bigger stories or the competition isn't. I'm not sure what difference that makes, or how much of that is the cause of so many of my stupid errors, beyond the errors that creep in when I don't adequately accuracy check my stories before shipping them off. After all, the deadline for the Daily Record simply changes from 5:30 p.m. to noon, so the pressure's still there, particularly if something were to happen at 11 and I needed to get it finished and in by noon.

I also, and I know how some of my readers feel about this, feel at some level like leaving the Globe is admitting a failure on my part to make it at the Global level. Despite my mediocre career path and only-just-above-average academic performance I don't like admitting failure. I've never dropped a class, even when I felt like I should, and I still made it through the end, even though I know for a fact I didn't deserve the inflated grade I recieved.

Even worse would be to leave daily newspapers all together or journalism. It's the one thing I've built my professional life around. I've made contacts, worked my network, went to the right school, took on the good internships, went out there to sell myself on internships (and hopefully didn't dissapoint enough to lose my chances at the San Antonio Express-News), traveled a lot farther than I actually thought I would and reaped the benefits. I also learned that I knew nothing about big-city dailies when I got my first big-city daily internship, nor my first job. It's not something I even want to consider doing.

My thoughts: Leaving a big-city for a smaller-city daily and getting the design experience might eventually make me more marketable, even if the Daily Record pays a lot more attention to the mundane bog of city politics (20 inches on the budget numbers, anyone?) and the smarmier side of the news features (with plenty of "execution at dawn" photos, none of which I want to take and would desperately try to avoid, along with the "hold that trophy, smile and pose!" pictures). I figure someone with some design, reporting and photography skills might be impressive to future employers, if only they'd be kind enough to not draw too much attention to the whopping longevity of my career at the Globe (actually of the last eight to leave the Globe I'd be fifth for career length).

On the other hand, there's lots of people who've pulled those skills together, so I doubt how remarkable that really is. What I'd really like to do (this is really hazy, I actually don't have a 5, 10 or 15 year plan) is find myself in a city of maybe 150,000 - 180,000. Quite literally I'm thinking Knoxville, Tenn. It was a nice city. Joplin is about 45,000 and Toledo was about 300,000. New York City is about 8,000,000, for comparison.

And that's about as far as I got. The interview is Monday. They may reject me flat out, which would certainly clear up some of those details. It would be nice, however, to have some option out there. I mean right now my options are a) stay at the Globe b) make use of my only other connection to find a job if there is one in weeklies or semi-weeklies c) look for another job, an option which seriously scares me or d) flag down a passing UFO and hope for a fresh start.

Here's to what the future holds. In the meanwhile, wish me luck.

The latest: I have a job interview Monday with the Lebanon Daily Record. I'm not sure I'll even be offered the job (it involves some design/editing work and I have only very very little experience in that field). I've also had some problems with errors in the last two newspapers I've worked for. On the other hand, I've also gotten some pretty good clips from the last two newspapers I've worked for and I have experience reporting in small town southwest Missouri. I'm also willing to do anything they ask, I somewhat know my way around a camera and I'm not afraid to work the miserable pisant hours of the day (I do that already even if I don't put it on my timesheet and after all, what else am I going to do? social life? what?).

The upsides: from what I've heard from the editor the position: part education reporter, part Sunday editor, part stagecoach shotgun rider (if Lenny's sick) pays better than my wages right now, at least $500 per year more. At least for a little while I might end up living with my grandparents 30 miles away from the newspaper and I imagine at this point I'd try to find a place to live in their town largely to have loved ones nearby, that's definitely been missing from my life these last 7 months. Maybe they'd even let me help them out with housework and yardwork. And grandma's a much better cook than I.

Downsides: I'm not sure that a smaller daily would be any less stress than a bigger one. I mean the workload would probably still be there, even if the push for the bigger stories or the competition isn't. I'm not sure what difference that makes, or how much of that is the cause of so many of my stupid errors, beyond the errors that creep in when I don't adequately accuracy check my stories before shipping them off. After all, the deadline for the Daily Record simply changes from 5:30 p.m. to noon, so the pressure's still there, particularly if something were to happen at 11 and I needed to get it finished and in by noon.

I also, and I know how some of my readers feel about this, feel at some level like leaving the Globe is admitting a failure on my part to make it at the Global level. Despite my mediocre career path and only-just-above-average academic performance I don't like admitting failure. I've never dropped a class, even when I felt like I should, and I still made it through the end, even though I know for a fact I didn't deserve the inflated grade I recieved.

Even worse would be to leave daily newspapers all together or journalism. It's the one thing I've built my professional life around. I've made contacts, worked my network, went to the right school, took on the good internships, went out there to sell myself on internships (and hopefully didn't dissapoint enough to lose my chances at the San Antonio Express-News), traveled a lot farther than I actually thought I would and reaped the benefits. I also learned that I knew nothing about big-city dailies when I got my first big-city daily internship, nor my first job. It's not something I even want to consider doing.

My thoughts: Leaving a big-city for a smaller-city daily and getting the design experience might eventually make me more marketable, even if the Daily Record pays a lot more attention to the mundane bog of city politics (20 inches on the budget numbers, anyone?) and the smarmier side of the news features (with plenty of "execution at dawn" photos, none of which I want to take and would desperately try to avoid, along with the "hold that trophy, smile and pose!" pictures). I figure someone with some design, reporting and photography skills might be impressive to future employers, if only they'd be kind enough to not draw too much attention to the whopping longevity of my career at the Globe (actually of the last eight to leave the Globe I'd be fifth for career length).

On the other hand, there's lots of people who've pulled those skills together, so I doubt how remarkable that really is. What I'd really like to do (this is really hazy, I actually don't have a 5, 10 or 15 year plan) is find myself in a city of maybe 150,000 - 180,000. Quite literally I'm thinking Knoxville, Tenn. It was a nice city. Joplin is about 45,000 and Toledo was about 300,000. New York City is about 8,000,000, for comparison.

And that's about as far as I got. The interview is Monday. They may reject me flat out, which would certainly clear up some of those details. It would be nice, however, to have some option out there. I mean right now my options are a) stay at the Globe b) make use of my only other connection to find a job if there is one in weeklies or semi-weeklies c) look for another job, an option which seriously scares me or d) flag down a passing UFO and hope for a fresh start.

Here's to what the future holds. In the meanwhile, wish me luck.

I'm really not sure what else I should say. Quite honestly there hasn't been that dynamic of a change this week. I managed to keep my job another week, which is unfortunately more than I can say for one of my co-workers.

He had been here two months, worked himself extremely hard to pull up his production for number of stories and, admittedly, was a lot more challenging in his conversation with the editors. So after deciding he had not been producing like they were paying him too he was canned Monday morning.

My God, did that ratchet up the pressure. Personally my own production is just as piss poor if worse than his, I'm really just surving from week to week with the number of stories I put out. I need to know my towns better and make better contacts because I feel like my beat is dangerously slipping away from me. What I need is a schedule, I believe, or some confidence to begin with that I really can do the job. Whichever's easier to come by I suppose.

In other news, I'm still broke. It's ridiculous really, for not living any level of lavish lifestyle (I live in a fairly low-rent district, when I eat out it's usually cheap and I don't eat with any particular look toward class or sophistication), but I somehow manage to plow my way through every dime I'm paid and more (overdraft charges) with the bank. All the while I'm still in ridiculous debt to my parents. Yes, I'm definitely sort of gripping to the edge of "functioning human being." While it gets you out in the air the drafts are uncomfortable.

Um, good news, well, the weather's nice. Great exercise, walking, actually get out of the office while it's light out weather. Regardless of how it may completely screw up my long-term deadlines I need to spend more time outside, I've earned plenty of hours by working late Monday and Saturday and it's too nice to muggle on inside.

Sorry there's not more to say, it's been pretty cloudy here.