Is There Life After Layoff?

In an elegy for The News Tribune, a New Jersey newspaper that ceased to exist last year, one of its reporters, David Levitt, wrote, "When you get to heaven, be sure to check out the newsstand." The elegy, which appeared in The New York Times, told how in heaven everyone reads the papers that have died on earth: not only Levitt's News Tribune, but also a distinguished mix of old and new. The Philadelphia Bulletin, The New York Herald Tribune, New York Newsday, The Houston Post, and The Baltimore Evening Sun. Lately, it's been getting pretty crowded up there.

But a heavenly end for a newspaper can mean hell on earth for those left behind. So can downsizing, outsourcing, and staff reductions. What has demoralized America's other jobholders has demoralized journalists, too. The print newsroom workforce declined more than 3,000, which is more than 5 percent, between 1989 and 1994, according to figures from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. There is hardly a newsroom anywhere in this country where reporters and editors haven't secretly wondered, "Can it happen here?" The answer is, "You'd better believe it."

And then what happens? I spoke to reporters and editors who have been through it all: the shock, the pain, and the panic, as well as the mustering of the courage to get on with life.

 Some of those who have found new jobs, either inside or outside journalism, say they often feel incredibly guilty for having landed on their feet while others are still struggling. Some of those who haven't describe their feelings as something like post-traumatic stress syndrome. I spoke to a former jazz critic who now does public relations for the local opera. "There is more to being laid off than just losing a job," he says. "I had to confront surviving on my own, and who I am, if I am not the big entertainment writer anymore. I had to rethink my sense of identity. There's also a sense of loneliness. At a newspaper, you are surrounded by a lot of creative, energetic, and intelligent people, and as a free-lancer, you spend a lot of time alone. I like being around people."

But this man said the thought of sending out a barrage of résumés is daunting, too. "How do you follow up? How do you make yourself stand out? When you call an editor, what do you talk about?"

For many, a new job means leaving family, friends, and a beloved city behind. "I am missing Houston terribly," says a reporter who found a job in California after The Houston Post folded. "And I can't go back and visit because with this new job, I am not getting vacation any time soon."

Given the market these days, the chance of finding a job at another newspaper is increasingly slim. One editor was interviewed thirty-four times at the newspaper he was applying to before he got the job; another was interviewed twenty-seven times at the same paper, and didn't get the job. For a lucky few, the abrupt end to one career means the opening of another.

 Most of the journalists I talked to said they have no regrets, that they tried new things and took chances they might never have taken if they had stayed where they were. Others said it was a nightmare. All of them said they will never feel secure in a job again.

 Judi Dash

I had worked at The Record in Hackensack, New Jersey, for thirteen years, and I had been travel editor for seven years. Layoffs were expected, but I didn't expect to be laid off. It happened in September of 1991.

 The Record gave me a month with an outplacement service, and that was a wonderful thing to have done. People who are laid off are so depressed, they just want to sleep in and drink coffee, but you need to not sink. The outplacement service was a godsend. I had to get dressed in business attire every day. They gave me an office with a telephone to call anywhere in the country, and a secretarial staff to type up résumés.

 I really did not want to go, but I went the very next day. I figured I would have plenty of time to be depressed while I was waiting for responses to my calls and résumés to come in.

 A lot of people who are laid off spend months bad-mouthing the paper. That's self-defeating. No matter how bitter you are, don't burn your bridges. The journalism world is very small. We are not very realistic or world-wise. We think of ourselves as people who are outside business. But the reality is we are part of a business. And it has a bottom line and needs. The only value we have is what we can provide for the employer on a day-to-day basis.

 When I was laid off, I lost my sense of entitlement. If I was going to stay in a career that I loved, I had to think about what I could offer.

The key for me was the networks I had formed. I had been a member of the Editors Council of the Society of American Travel Writers. We used to send each other our travel sections. So after I was laid off, I called all my colleagues in my profession and told them what had happened. And it really paid off. It jump-started me. At least once a day an editor would contact me and say I was welcome to free-lance. It wasn't lots and lots of money, but it bolstered my self-confidence.

I wanted to stay in travel, so I talked to all these editors and asked what they were looking for. I had to temper what I loved with what was marketable. And out of that have come two nationally syndicated columns, "The Active Traveler" and "Travel Gear and Gadgets." I also write for national magazines.

Free-lancing is the wave of the future, because so many papers use independent contractors now. I sell articles and photographs. I really work hard, but I make a lot more money.

Lisa Bass

I had worked the night before August 19, 1995, at The Houston Post, where I was a copy editor. The next morning I got a phone call from a friend who worked for The Houston Chronicle. "How do you feel?" she asked. "Well, tired," I answered. "Aren't you just devastated?" she said. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then she told me the Post had shut down. Rumors had been going around for years, but we learned to ignore them.

 My husband, Frank Bass, who was the Post's medical writer, was on assignment in the middle of a war zone in Guatemala, with a group of doctors who were donating their time to poor people. He was in a very remote village in the highlands. I spent the next two hours with my limited Spanish trying to track him down. The paper cut off his corporate American Express card, but luckily they had already paid for his plane ticket home.

When the paper folded, we had kids, aged eight, three, and one, and a mortgage. The paper gave us forty-three days of severance pay. Our life insurance ended the day the Post closed, and our medical insurance ended at the end of that month.

Since we were both out of work, we decided early on that it would be counterproductive for Frank to be interviewing in Albuquerque and me in St. Louis. I felt as a copy editor that I was more portable. So the way we handled our search was for him to take a very active role and I would follow along.

 It took Frank about four months to get a job, and he is a top-notch writer who has won lots of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He interviewed with about a half-dozen papers, and all expressed interest, but then they either had hiring freezes, or tight budgets, or bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

He was finally hired by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and we packed up and moved there, although we didn't sell our house.

The worst time of this whole experience for us was leaving Houston. I immediately hated Fort Worth. The Star-Telegram did not seem likely to have a job for a copy editor. I was developing an addiction to the soaps and gaining weight.

So for lack of anything better to do, I taught myself to design World Wide Web home pages, and I designed one for everyone who had been laid off by the Post - the Toasted Posties. I was trying to keep the Post community together, and I needed to tell the world what had happened. I was taking potshots at William Dean Singleton, the Post's former owner.

 It started to attract attention, and one day a reporter from The Wall Street Journal's Texas Journal, a weekly insert, called and did a little story about it. We talked a long time, and I told her our situation. Two weeks later, she called back and said there was an opening for a reporter at The Wall Street Journal in Houston, if my husband was interested. We faxed his résumé right away, and he got the job. It was a direct result of my home page, and when I started it, I thought it would have no useful purpose but to allow me to vent.

When we moved back to Houston, I started seriously sending out résumés to small, suburban dailies, and within three weeks, I had a job as features editor at one of them. I am also designing web pages now. I had no idea that would become such a useful skill.

 Even though we ended up on our feet, we also went through a period of incredible turmoil and pain. I personally know of two divorces in Post families, where the job situation added to the
 tension. There was tension in our marriage, too.
 I know of people who have gone through
 terrible times, like selling their houses right before they would have been foreclosed. The choice for most Post people was to leave town or to leave journalism.

 I had to take a pretty significant pay cut myself, but at least I am still in journalism.

Ellis Widner

Ihad been at The Tulsa Tribune about fifteen years and I was the features editor when the paper closed in September of 1992. But we knew it was coming, and I had already started to put out feelers. In fact, I went right into another job as entertainment editor of The Philadelphia Daily News. At that time, jobs were still out there, although there was a sense that things were tightening.

 When you are laid off or your paper closes, you are not aware of how much you are reacting to the loss of a job and how little you are using your inner good sense. So when someone offers you a job, you have a sense of pride as well as a sense of desperation. You are relieved because someone wants you. Like Sally Field at the Academy Awards, you say, "You really do like me!"

But all that can cloud your judgment. You have to open your eyes and imagine what it is really like to work at the paper that is hiring you. In Philadelphia, I was responsible for the entertainment coverage of the fifth largest city in America, and I had much too small a staff. I found the layers of management in Philadelphia were like an onion. The more you peeled away, the more layers there were. And I did not have enough of a support staff.

 When I decided to leave Philadelphia and take another job, I said to myself that I was going to be smarter this time. I was in touch with editors at The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock on a cordial basis the whole time I was in Philadelphia. And you can bet that I talked to a lot of people at the Democrat-Gazette before I came here. I called ahead, asking questions about what it was like to work there, how hard it was to get things done, and how cooperative people were.

I think the key, and it's something journalists don't always think about, is to use the same journalistic skills that you use on stories in looking for a job. Be gregarious, talk to everyone, use your research skills and study the paper's history. How have they treated the staff in the past?

 I started here in May of 1995. I am part of a team of three editors who have created a new feature section called Style. I also edit weekly sections focused on entertainment, and I write a weekly column. We are really a team, we respect each other, and it's a pleasure to work here. It's the best working situation I have ever been in.

Denise Hamilton

Between 200 and 250 people were laid off from the Los Angeles Times when I was let go last August. I loved working for City Times, the paper's weekly section about the central city. We thought we were so safe, for politically correct reasons. We thought the last place that would be affected by layoffs was inner-city coverage.

 I had been at the Times ten years, and I had traveled to the Balkans on a Fulbright scholarship while I was at the paper. I had also free-lanced for other sections of the paper.

I cried and felt shock when I was laid off. But once the tears dried, I realized this was a great opportunity. They were pushing me out of the nest. Plus I got a year's salary as severance pay. So I tried not to take it personally. I looked at it as a real business decision. I got in touch with all sections of the Los Angeles Times - travel, business, real estate, Calendar, and Life & Style - and immediately lined up free-lance work. I had lots of story ideas. A month after I was laid off, I found out I was pregnant. I realized this was a God-given opportunity to slow down and assess where I was going. I am still in transition. I am applying for full-time jobs, but this is tiding me over while I explore other options. Getting laid off forces you to get out there.

I have also been free-lancing for publications such as LA Weekly and Wired. I have been writing for foundations, too. I have a lot of energy and I am able to juggle a lot of projects at once. I love to pitch stories, and I find it much more effective to query people over the Internet. It's a lot more intimate and fast. It also takes perseverance, so I just keep pitching. Right now, I have a lot of work.

Lori Eisenberger

Changing careers was what I call a no-brainer. I had worked eighteen years at The News Tribune in Woodbridge, New Jersey. I started there while I was a graduate student at New York University. I had been a clerk, a municipal reporter, a features writer, the education writer, and, as of last year, an education columnist.

 It was the school of hard knocks. I worked my way up. I worked night shifts. I never missed work because of my kids. I only took off three months when they were born. When my daughter was two and had to have emergency surgery because she fell down the stairs and bit through her tongue, I left work for the surgery and then came back to finish my shift. When they called me last summer to tell me the paper was being sold, I was working at home in a wheelchair, with a broken ankle.

 I was dedicated. I paid my dues. In my head, this was for life. I put out a hundred percent. But people don't appreciate dedication. The new owners of the paper, which was merged with another, chose not to hire me. In fact, eighty percent of the staff was not picked up.

I applied to a couple of other papers, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking it's time for a change. I am forty-one, and I refuse to go backward. No more working night shifts and weekends. My priorities have changed. They have shifted to my kids. I don't want to miss my kids growing up. And thinking that way, I wanted to do something that made sense.

 Sure, I cried when I was let go because I loved my job. I felt rejected because they didn't want me. But becoming a teacher made perfect sense. I am already certified because I majored in English and education as an undergraduate. When I spoke to teachers as an education writer, I spoke to them as a peer. They felt comfortable and secure talking to me. Kids make you feel wonderful about yourself. They give back immediately, while in journalism, everyone is out for themselves. Teaching is much less competitive. You don't have to be a star. Everybody is working together and on the same team, helping the kids.

So the paper folded in October, and I started substitute teaching in my hometown district in December. By March, I had a full-time position. My specialty is middle school and high school English. The pay is excellent in education today and so are the benefits, including the pension. When I am sixty-five, I'll be saying this was the best thing that could happen to me.

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