WHY I QUIT

 
JOSEPH DEW
 
Dew spent twenty years as a reporter before leaving the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer in 1998 without a job. He is the founder and executive director of The Ministry Incubator, designed to aid start-up faith-based nonprofits.
 
I was on the state desk for the News and Observer. I traveled so much, my wife was beginning to become depressed. I joined the state government and politics staff, and that worked pretty well for a while, but it became a problem when the legislative session dragged out to the end of the summer. Your wife and friends were going out to the beach and you'd say, "I'll get down there tomorrow." Or you'd get there with your laptop and the next morning you'd be working.

I always wanted somebody to say, "He's the best damn legislative reporter in this state." I wanted to be excellent. But it just impairs your family life.
I was a line editor in our Durham office between editors for five months, and I learned you could be a little more humane. We had a little contest. We'd agree that in the next two weeks the person who writes the best lead gets the afternoon off. As a reporter, I did my best work for an editor who would say, "I know you've been planning to be gone early on Friday for the last three weeks, go ahead." But 95 percent of the mid-level editors were afraid to try something like that. I think about 75 percent of the staff could have a four-day workweek. You're working ten hours a day anyway. If you have a cops reporter, it doesn't matter if everyone else walks in at 9 o'clock and the cops reporter walks in at 2 o'clock. All you want is your reporters to do the job. Most people in the business are college-educated and have some degree of creativity. You have to give them the opportunity to let the gifts flow out. The kind of things newspapers can absolutely do and refuse to do make me crazy.

My son was born prematurely; he has some disabilities. I wanted to be a part of his life, and there was no way I could be a ten-or-twelve-hours-a-day newspaper guy and be in my son's life. The last editor I had would call me at 7 a.m. and say, "Can you get on the road now?" I'd say, "No, I've got my kid every morning. I can't go on the road."

I quit without a job. I literally didn't know what my next step was. I was just trying to do what was right for me and my son and my faith. The business talks this fabulous game about changing to meet this new world. And we'll redesign the paper fifty times. But we never really change ourselves.
-- Interview by Jane Gottlieb

 
DARRYL
CAMPAGNA-MCGRATH

Campagna-McGrath spent fifteen years in newspapers. Early this year, the Times Union in Albany, where she'd worked once before, recruited her from The Buffalo News to cover city government. She took the job but resigned in March, after five weeks.

The TU asked me what would it take to get me back. They matched my salary, gave me a signing bonus, they gave me three weeks off with pay for the wedding.

But I was concerned. In Buffalo, there had been great faith placed on my judgment, and very little daily interference. The Times Union was known to keep a very close watch on the day-to-day activities of reporters. But the senior editors made it very clear they were now craving a reporter who could do the in-depth, analytical stories and projects. And this was the state capital in a hot, interesting year. It was a mouth-watering opportunity.

I presented a list of close to a dozen story ideas, from simple to complex, how policies and decisions shape the city. But very early, I noticed a persistent and daily pattern of commands coming from the city desk. The feeling was "Drop this, do that;" "No, drop that, do this;" "No, do both of them;" "No, scrap both of them, do this instead;" "Actually, why don't you finish all three?" And at the same time, I felt that my ideas for stories and how to pursue them were dismissed out of hand.

The week that I quit, I had learned that the federal Housing and Urban Development agency was considering a full-out audit of one of the mayor's most important economic development operations. I thought the city desk would have wanted me to drop what I was doing to pursue some of the stories I was telling them about. I realized early on that I was never going to be allowed to even get started, and I felt there was a not very subtle effort to put me in my place.

Driving home on a snowy night, I said to my husband, "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I really think I should quit." I went to see one senior editor, then the managing editor, and finally the editor. All three said essentially that things were not going to change and I would need to have an open mind. They gave me a four-week buyout. They told me they felt very bad because they had heavily recruited me.

I'm not sure I will ever be back in a newsroom again.
-- Interview by Jane Gottlieb
 

JOANNE JACOBS

Jacobs was a columnist and editorial writer at the San Jose Mercury News when she left the paper in January 2001.
 
I think I am an example of people my age, baby boomers, who've been working for about twenty-six years and who get to a point where you say, Well, do I do this for the rest of my life and leave when they cart me off on a gurney? Or do I look around and do something different?

It's not that I wanted to leave journalism. I had been writing the column for fifteen or sixteen years, twice a week, and writing school-bond editorials. After a while you get tired.

I think it's hard for a newspaper to continually create challenges for people, the chance to work on really exciting projects. Also, people change in what they want to do. You're always going to have a certain number of people who get into their forties and start thinking that it's time to at least partially reinvent themselves.

The Mercury News became very Silicon Valley and technology and business oriented. If you really wanted to build your career, you went and wrote on business. For some people, that was fine. But I felt that the paper was neglecting everything else and I didn't want to work for the Electrical Engineering Times.

I had always had a high degree of freedom as a columnist. And then I was sort of getting messages from my boss that he wanted me to write less about education and he wanted to be more in control of what I was writing. Part of me said I don't want to be a prima donna, but having that freedom was very important to me.

I had a book idea and I thought this would really be fun. It's scary but it's scary good, not scary stupid. It's scary in a growth-inducing way.

The thing I miss is being able to turn around in my chair and say something to somebody. I miss having someone who is sort of committed to running whatever I write, and I miss the ability to say I'm doing a column and I know for certain it will work. It was a pretty darn nice rut. I knew that rut, it was a luxury rut.
-- Interview by Ariel Hart
 

BETH BERSELLI

Berselli, twenty-six, joined The Washington Post at age twenty-two. She covered business, worked for the metro desk, and was an assistant reporter for The Reliable Source, a political gossip column. Last spring, she gave it all up to become a teacher.
 
I always wanted to take time off from journalism and do some public service. The Post had sent me to a bureau in southern Maryland. I covered a lot of school board meetings. That's how I heard about Teach for America.

Then The Reliable Source needed an assistant reporter, and not just to get the coffee. I wrote half the column most days. We wrote up every celebrity who came to testify before Congress. I met everyone from Fabio to Robert Redford to Gwyneth Paltrow. I did a really cool feature on Mike Myers's mother-in-law, the coffee talk lady. I met the First Lady, attended White House functions. It was a ton of fun. But after a year, I was ready to go. It was stressful doing it every day, and it wasn't helping my writing skills.

I applied for Teach for America. After two years of service, I get a grant to get my master's degree. On July 22 I came to Phoenix.

Now I'm teaching the times tables to fourth- and fifth-graders who really should know them by now. I'm in a heavily Latino district with some blacks in south Phoenix. I'm the only white person. I'm out of my comfort zone. When I went to the Post, at least I knew how to write a lead. But how do I write a lesson plan? I earn $29,000, about three-fifths of what I was earning. And teachers have to pay for stuff. Kids can't afford binders. But it's much more rewarding and it's a lot of fun. In my last job, I wasn't really making any contribution. In terms of what I'm doing next, I'm playing it by ear. If I go back to the Post or to another newspaper, maybe I'd be an excellent education reporter. If I hadn't done this, I'd still be a successful reporter, but I wouldn't have any life experience.
-- Interview by Jane Gottlieb