Tom Mangan’s home page

A couple of daring young Internet entrepreneurs have smiled upon the Mangan household, extending an offer of full-time employment. All I have to do is play on a computer and think of ways to make hikers’ lives happier. The commute is about 20 feet, I can set my own work schedule, I even get the federal holidays off.

I was born with a bleak outlook — I’m never surprised when stock markets or airliners crash — so I had prepared myself, financially and mentally, for six months to a year of idling and fretting till I found another job. Well, get this: I qualified for exactly one week of unemployment benefits; the rest of the time I had free-lance projects lined up. So much for the blissful freedom of being out of work.

One of the first things I did after arriving in North Carolina was interview for a newspaper job 120 miles up the road in Roanoke, Virginia. I spent a whole day trying to convince the good folks up there that I really had this one thing I needed to accomplish in the newspaper biz. Good thing I’m such a terrible liar.

When I got home, I had an e-mail in my in-box asking if I’d like to help out with a slightly technical free-lance job at a website that promised a fair amount of drudgery in the short run but held a world of promise and full-time potential in the long run. Then I asked myself: do I really even want to work at newspapers anymore? I knew the answer, and that’s the moment I knew my newspaper life was over.

At some point I may assemble a post-mortem on my newspaper career, but there’s no way it can be written without kicking my long-suffering brethren still working in newsrooms. All the people who mattered in my newspaper life — the grunts within earshot of my F-bomb explosions — were good to me for every day of the 20-plus years I worked on sending pages to the pressroom. As Dylan said in one of his songs, “I have nothing but good thoughts of those who sailed with me.”

The thing was: I was hired on at my first paper in 1987 to copy edit and lay out pages. In 2009 I was still copy editing and laying out pages. Newspapers that did everything right still lost readers. Didn’t seem to matter what we did, the answer was always the same: fewer readers this year than last.

After 22 years of things never getting better, the prospect of six months to a year of sloth and worry seemed like a step up.

So maybe it’s true what they say about luck being where planning and opportunity collide. Five years ago I did a presentation for copy editors called “The Future Doesn’t Need us Anymore.” In the next three years our copy desk staff shrank from 40 to 15. In the final indignity, it got shifted to a lower-cost locale 60 miles up the road, with a 20 percent pay cut as thanks for everybody’s hard work in these trying times. I had plenty of time to figure out how it was going to shake out, and I did do something about it.

The oddest consequence of all this is that my path into the future ran through the woods. People often heard me say a hiking blog was a contradiction in terms: bloggers don’t hike, hikers don’t blog. I never had more than 500 people a day stop by; most days it’s around 250. But enough of them saw something in my online musings to take a chance on me.

Right now I owe it all to a hiking blog. Who’d a thunk?