Well, I’m a waiter

Four years of college. Thousands of dollars of my dad’s money. Two years at the Sandusky Register. Three years at the Naples Daily News. Risking it all and writing for the Boston Globe, one of the most read newspapers in the country, for the past seven months.

All that now to be back where I was before entering journalism.

I took a job yesterday as a waiter/host at Piccadilly Pub, working only four shifts a week for a total of about 20 hours. First off, sigh. Second off, I’m a little bit excited to head back into the service industry. I feel a little bit like Larry David in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where he tries to sell cars for a day. Only he did it for fun. I’m doing it for the money.

As a freelancer for the past seven months, we’re been living on the edge of a knife, financially. With the bottom falling out when Globe Northwest closed down today, we need money right away. We don’t have the savings for me to go job hunting for a month or two to find a job more in line with my education and experience. I’m not eligible for unemployment, since I was not an employee of the Globe, just a consultant. Sarah’s Saturday job at Gymboree pays some bills, but there’s still some large expenses looming. So, I needed a job that would start generating money right away (and more than minimum wage). Thus, I’m a waiter.

I’m not terribly worried about being a waiter forever. My only big worry right now is generating enough money to pay some expenses and rent through the end of April. I’m pretty sure the hours I’m getting at Piccadilly Pub won’t cover that, so this will not be the only entry-level, no college degree required job I’m getting. I fully expect to have another waiter job within a week or two (or a similar job).

I’m sure (and I pray) that this is temporary. The Patriot Ledger in southern Boston already has me in line for a job opening in July, although it pays less than my first reporting job. The Boston Globe is still talking about reassigning me to a different regional section. Although reporters are in less demand these days, other newspapers are hiring as well. There’s also other options to consider. Law school pops up in my mind more and more lately. There’s several other career tracts to consider.

But for now, I’m a waiter. Starting Tuesday, I’ll be slinging food at the Piccadilly Pub. May I take your order?

Does money exist in a vacuum, too?

Today, I began my first major move away from The Dream, actively trying to get a job that would take me away from the house. I’ve done some work before today applying to a few jobs, but today the reality is definitely settling that in a week or less, I will no longer be working from home with my wife and child. I will be back in the working world.

Of course, on this darkest of days, I had to get glimmers of hope. For the first time since moving to Boston, I’m working on a story that’s not for the Boston Globe. I’m working on a stay-at-home dad piece for the Father’s Day edition of the Boston Parents’ Paper. Also, after interviewing at the Patriot Ledger on Thursday the editor there says I should submit freelance articles before a job opens up in July. To top it all off, I got a solid lead on a story for either Boston Magazine or the Improper Bostonian.

So, basically, after seven months of trying to branch out beyond the Boston Globe, I’m actually branching out beyond the Boston Globe. Of course, it comes at a time when my role with the Globe is either being eliminated or significantly reduced, so it may be too little too late.  Still, all this got me thinking that I may not have to give up on The Dream at all. Maybe I could stick with an even more unstable financial lifestyle just to stay home with my daughter, my wife and my soon-to-be-born son.

When I worked in Florida, a city official and I joked all the time that time existed in a vacuum: that no matter how long a City Council agenda was, the City Councilmen would find a way to drag it out for at least five hours. Time existed in a vacuum because no matter what, the hours came and went.

After scratching a living in the Great Boston Experiment for seven months, I’ve started to suspect that money exists in a vacuum, too. We need roughly $2,000 a month to survive, and no matter what, the money would come in. Whether I got enough articles published in a given month, family members sent us money for holidays, birthdays and our anniversary, or our expenses suddenly dropped for that month, we’ve managed to pay our expenses for seven months without me having to leave our family paradise for the working world.

However, this certainly feels like the end of The Dream. I can no longer count on the Globe for anything, and I doubt I can make up the difference with a couple of other publications (as awesome as they might be). I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t want to give up on this family paradise, so maybe this whole Money Exists in a Vacuum theory is just my last little bit of hope.

Or maybe there is something to it.

Great Boston Experiment passes 3,000 hits

OK, I’m likely going to stop with the hit updates after this. The first 1,000 was a milestone and was cool to me the blog was read that many times. The second 1,000 was cool as well since it meant the blog had sustainability beyond a few popular posts, even if the Google gods helped get the last few hundred. This latest 1,000 –achieved in less than a month — is cool, although it comes almost exclusively from the Great Boston Experiment being the No. 1 Google Image search for “Boston map.” Having this many views is nice, although I’d prefer it be for the articles rather than the one map.

End of The Dream?

You can expect a similarly titled entry in a week or two, only without the question mark. The Dream of combining my work life and my family life into one powerful force to benefit both will soon be at an end.

The Boston Globe is shutting down its Northwest edition at the end of this month, doing away with the section where nearly all my Globe articles have been published. As a correspondent getting paid by the article, my payments from the Globe will be seriously reduced or outright eliminated.  I’m not a full-time employee, so there’s no responsibility on their part to keep giving me articles. No expectations that they have to help me land on my feet. No reason to keep paying me for stories when there is no place to publish them.

There is one small hope. My coverage areas are being folded into the paper’s North edition, so it’s conceivable the editors there could avail themselves of my services. However, the North edition doesn’t have much more space than the Northwest edition to run articles, so it’s hard to believe I would get the same number of articles in the paper each month, making it nearly impossible to live on my Globe payments alone. Some other manna could come down from heaven to keep the Great Boston Experiment going, but at this point, it’s not much more than hope.

It should be official in a week or two what will become of all us Northwest editors, staff writers and correspondents. I have no expectations of anything but a serious reduction or the outright elimination of the need for my services from the Globe. When we began this Great Boston Experiment more than six months ago, my plan was to use the Globe as a steady source of income while I started contributing articles to other publications: Improper Bostonian, Boston Magazine, hell, Sports Illustrated and Time while I was at it. Unfortunately, I never was able to break into another publication, leaving me with just the Globe, which should soon be gone. I have already started reviewing my other career options to see what our next step might be.

I have no doubt that Sarah, Maggie, Desmond and I will come through this thing to the other side. We have enough money coming in to carry us for bills through the next couple of weeks. After that, I should have no trouble getting a temporary gig to pay the bills while we finalize our next step. Although I am apprehensive about being stuck in a rut, I’m not above going back to work as a waiter for a little while just to keep us afloat. Beyond that, I’m confident that given enough time and perseverance I can get another job in the journalism field, or a starter job in another field should I choose to abandon my chosen profession. To be honest, I’m a little excited about what all this change might bring.

What I’m heartbroken about, though, is the loss of The Dream, the reason we started this Great Boston Experiment. Right now, I get to spend all day and night with my beautiful wife and my growing daughter. I’m there for all the doctor’s appointments, the playtimes, every meal. I’m not stuck in some 9-5 listening to a boss I don’t respect drone on and on about something that really doesn’t matter and doesn’t relate to the reason  I was hired. We’re together, every step of the way. Sure, we’re poor, and we’ve long abandoned life’s little luxuries; but it was all worth it because we’re happy spending all our time together (I think our grocery shopping trips have gotten a lot better, actually, now that we only have $25 a week for food). It’s scraping by, but it’s scraping by with a purpose. We’re doing it for each other. Not like in Florida where we went out to eat more but were distraught twice a day as I had to leave for a job I didn’t like. With the loss of The Dream could come a new job and new possibilities (and maybe more money, too), but it also means that I’ll be around less for Maggie’s second year and Desmond’s first year.

It’s a lot to lose.

But we press onward. For some time now, I’ve felt like I was flying too close to the sun; that life couldn’t really get this good. I worked, I stayed at home, I watched my daughter blossom and held my wife’s hand through this second pregnancy. Sure, there were some bumps in the road (homesickness over Florida, the long winter, the inconsistency of the Globe’s need for my services) but this weekend I dared to say this was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. I had this feeling like it all had to come crashing down. Maybe it’s not possible to combine your work life and your family life to the benefit of both. Maybe it’s just not possible for me. Or not possible in this economy. Or not possible in journalism, as the field is in an uproar.

Whatever the reason, if this truly is the end (and I expect it is) I can still take the spirit of the Great Boston Experiment with me. I can work hard, I can dedicate myself to a career, and I always will have my family. I love them more than life itself, and I can do no wrong by not compromising that love for anything.

Spring, Thanks God!

I’m not saying it’s not going to get below freezing again, or that it’s not going to snow again; but our long Massachusetts winter finally seems over. It was warm this Sunday, the sun was shining, we opened the windows, shut off the heat and took a long walk on the beautiful day. Most importantly, we put on our sandals.

Wearing sandals creates such a wonderful, carefree, unrestricted existence. Sarah has worn sandals and other open footwear for 80 percent of her life; and my last three years in Florida were dominated by sandals or bare feet, except when at work. After being forced into socks and shoes since October, life has not been the same. The constraints on your feet are more than just symbolic of winter trapping you to indoor heating and large coats. There’s a widespread relaxation that comes from having warm bare feet.

In moving from Florida, we knew our first winter would be rough, and it has been. Stuck inside, fearing the cold, dealing with overheated restaurants, bracing against the New England winds and wearing multiple layers of clothing; it all just got to be too much. While the first snow looks cool and feels cozy, ultimately snow is just cold and wet and turns to sludge when mixed with dirt and mud. And we had a lot of snow this year. Plus, in an effort to cut down on heating costs, we would only heat one or two rooms at a time, making the rest of the house unbearably cold. Having natural warmth and sunshine in your life just makes life all the much easier to live.

To top it off, Sunday was Spring Ahead day; the day where we all lose an hour of sleep but gain six months of extra sunshine. It’s the most underrated day of the year.

Spring, it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be happier.

Great Boston Experiment passes 2,000 hits

This morning, this Great Boston Experiment blog got its 2,000th hit. The first 1,000 hits came from interest in our articles, especially the Wage Slave post; but most of the second 1,000 has come from good luck and the gods of Google.

While there has been plenty of interest in our articles, most of the reason we went from 1,000 hits to 2,000 hits in less than two months is we’ve become the top search on Google Images for a Boston map.  The map in question was used for our Twenty Reasons Boston is unique to this planet post in December, and apparently for the last two weeks has worked its way up to the top Google Image search. The only thing I did was take the time to pick a suitable map (which originally came from a Google Image search) and the rest appears to be dumb luck. I have no idea how long this will last, but it was strange going from 10 page views a day to 50.

R.I.P. Rocky Mountain News

On Friday, my former employer — the E.W. Scripps Company — closed down its premier paper, the Rocky Mountain News. Now, Scripps owns many, many newspapers and several other properties as well, Monster.com and a bunch of other things I never cared about, but the Rocky Mountain News had won four Pulitzer Prizes, which is rare for a paper of any size; ranked among the top 30 paper circulations; and maintained in Denver, one of the last two-newspaper towns in this country. The fact that this newspaper could not continue on is either proof that the newspaper industry truly is dying or that corporations just don’t know how to run newspapers. Probably both.

The newspaper industry has been bleeding for some time now. Circulation drops as the younger generations have less interest in a daily subscription and competition is heavy from other media, particularly the Internet. Large papers like the New York Times, Boston Globe, Detroit Free-Press have significantly reduced the size of their newsrooms. However, the complete shutdown of the Rocky Mountain News brings a whole new level of despair. Partly because it’s the largest paper I’ve heard of that out and out closed, and partly because as a former Scripps employee, I had an idea of how the corporation felt about that paper.

When I heard the Rocky Mountain News was closing, there were many emotions, but none of them were surprise. Scripps crunched the numbers, decided the newspaper wouldn’t be profitable enough anymore and likely wouldn’t be for the immediate future. So, the company shut it down. That was the only consideration – money. There may have been some thought to the prestige of the paper, the employees that worked there, the symbolism of it closing down; but the one thing it ultimately came down to was money. Sadly, it seems that’s all that matters anymore. Does anyone in a position of power in the newspaper corporate structure really care what the purpose of newspapers is? That there is more to it than just dollars and cents? I doubt it.

Newspapers are a public service.  The government doesn’t support them in any way — and the government never should — but newspapers still provide a valuable public service. Newspapers are the check against the government; print reporters do the legwork and take the time to keep Richard Nixon in line, to assault another hideous George W. Bush policy, to uncover government corruption. Above all, they inform; newspapers let you know who the candidates are in the election, what time the church social is on Saturday, what public services are available to you for heating your home. With television news, you get at most a one-minute segment about a topic before they move onto something else. On the Internet, it’s hard to tell what’s accurate and what’s not because there isn’t any long-standing tradition of accuracy and truth. Magazines aren’t built for the daily life. Only newspapers provide comprehensive analysis and background on the issues of the day. But public support for newspapers is waning. Could it be because inside support for newspaper is waning? That the companies that actually own the newspaper don’t support them either? As someone inside the industry, that’s my best guess.

As a Scripps employee, I have sat in meetings talking about the future of the company, the future of the newspaper and blah blah blah. Here’s how it broke down: The company is adding sales reps; it’s increasing the size of its advertising department; adding a new department designed to market the newspaper to the public;  reworking the Web site, again; and, oh yeah, the newsroom — the place that produces the product we’re trying to sell, market and get advertising for — the staff is decreasing by 30 percent; you people in the newsroom are just going to have to work harder to maintain the quality of the product. It’s like if GM decided to add employees and spend extra money everywhere except in the places that actually makes the cars. Sales, marketing, whatever, we’re just going to cut back on our car-making workforce and hope that consumers don’t notice the product is getting worse. We’re marketing the product more, so why wouldn’t more people buy it? It’s like the newspaper companies don’t even think about the quality of the newspapers they put out: Can we put out as good of a paper with 300 reporters instead of 1,000? Sure! What product wouldn’t be improved or at least maintained by a 70 percent cut in the production staff! They just assume you put out a masthead and a bunch of pages filled with black and white type and pretty pictures, and people will buy it. What? Readership is declining? How can that be?

Here’s the most infuriating term I ever heard as a Scripps employee: non-revenue producing position. It’s how we were valued as workers. There were the revenue producing positions like sales, advertising and classifieds that directly interact with customers and bring money into the company. Then there was the non-revenue producing positions, like the reporters and the editors, who were nothing but a drain on the company’s profits and generate no money; we just the stories that made up the day’s news. If the company ever had the resources to hire an employee, you can bet it was definitely for a revenue producing position. I wanted to scream from the highest heights: HEY, WE’RE THE ONES THAT ACTUALLY CREATE THE NEWSPAPER EVERY DAY!! MAYBE OUR VALUE SHOULDN’T BE LOOKED AT IN TERMS OF HOW MANY PEOPLE I CAN SHAKE DOWN!! In a situation like that, though, my screams wouldn’t have amounted to anything. I was just a non-revenue producing employee.

As a journalist, working in that environment was terribly disheartening. In reporters and editors, newspaper companies have perhaps the most giving workforce in the world. No journalist, especially a print journalist, goes into the business for the money. It’s just not there. In my first job as a reporting, I made less money than a manager at McDonalds. In my second job, I made less money than a server at an Applebees. Even the top reporter or editor in a newsroom isn’t going to be hauling in more than an beginning investment banker. We’re in the job because we love journalism. We love everything it is about: interacting with people, informing the public, being that check against bad public policy, uncovering corruption, getting a great scoop, telling a groundbreaking story. We go into the job basically telling our employers that we’re there to put out the best product imaginable. Yet, they don’t care about putting out the best product imaginable. They care about putting out the most profitable product, which in this day and age means creating an inferior product for less money.

Maybe, just maybe, companies could start looking at their products more than just as moneymakers. Maybe, just maybe, instead of assessing companies strictly on the bottom line, they can be assessed based on who makes the best cars, the best frozen dinners, the best shoes and, yes, the best newspapers. Sure, the point of a business is to be profitable, but in order to sell your product you have to provide something people want. It might be more profitable in the short term to make an inferior product for less money; but in the long term, people want a high-quality product. Clearly, would-be newspaper customers aren’t happy with the current quality of the product, so maybe it’s time to increase the quality.

Rest in Peace, Rocky Mountain News. You served Denver, the great state of Colorado and journalism as a whole admirably for 150 years. Yes, you’re passing is a sad commentary on the state of newspapers and readership, but — more importantly — it shows that Scripps failed where others succeeded for a century and a half. It shows that the Scripps model for running a newspaper just doesn’t work. As for all the other corporations doing massive cutbacks in newsrooms across the nation even before the economy tanked, maybe it’s time to invest in a quality product before it’s too late.