Caution: Fork Ahead

I’m losing my job. They’re closing the website where I work with nine other journalists. Lucky me, though: they’re phasing us out. While most of my coworkers will be out of work as of Friday, I will, to the best of my knowledge, have a job until Dec. 31, at which time I will be given my walking papers and my (rather generous) severance package.

For all of us whose sweat, tears and cuticles have mixed with the sandwich crumbs and spilled pop inside our QWERTY keyboards, it’s decision time. What’s next?

I find myself in the rather unusual position of being able to see what’s coming. Most of my coworkers had two weeks from the date they learned they would be losing their jobs to the end. They have had to quickly recover from the shock of it all and get down to the serious business of finding jobs to pay bills and care for families. As things stand now I have the time and the money to plan.

Having been a tool of the Man pretty much since I left daily newspapers in 2000, I have little interest now in continuing that relationship. I might consider going to work for my old boss, were the right situation to present itself. I think daily newspapers as they are now are pretty much fucked. Wall Street has extorted whatever easy profits were to be had and left journalism’s carcass rotting in the sun. Public companies should not own newspapers because public companies are beholden to shareholders, not readers. Owning a newspaper is a civic undertaking, and as far as I can tell most shareholders aren’t interested in civic undertakings (I should add, at least as it relates to their investments). So I will avoid stepping into that mess for now.

Good journalism, especially local journalism, does have a future. I could see trying to get some money together to start an online community news service. It might incorporate written stories, photos, audio and video posted daily to a website and emailed to subscribers, plus a once-a-week print publication with all of the previous week’s written stories and photos. It’d be a shitload of work for me, but I’d make sure it was done right.

Another option is to freelance, to write what I want to write but never find the time for. Maybe it’s a novel, maybe it’s a piece on the Chicago music scene. That’s appealing, but also a ton of work to make it pay. Also, I have no freelance contacts as of now; I’d be doing a lot of cold calling.

Those are the two top options at this point, provided I manage to benefit from the twin luxuries of time and money in the way I think I might. They’re both romantic, pie-in-the-sky thoughts. But what the hell? I’m 37, nearly 38. It’s time to dream a little, and maybe turn the dreams into something real. My cousin Julie (herself a talented writer) has been encouraging on this point. She and I are kindred spirits, artists struggling to emerge from our respective cocoons and fly toward the bright light of the possible.

The key for me will be to overcome The Fear. I have supportive people around me, though, which makes it all easier to contemplate. That fork in the road ahead is real, but I have plenty of warning. These next few months are gonna be real interesting.