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It was sobering to emerge from my newspaper cocoon and find all the skills I developed there were worth precisely zilch. I got my new job because of my hobbies, not because of my chosen craft.

My last day at the Mercury News concluded much like the first — same job, same desk, same daily dose of depravity. In the good old days of, say, 2004, a job at the Merc was resume gold; folks were always leaving for sexier gigs at the L.A. and New York Times. Five years later everybody I knew at every talent level was in the same bind: eminently qualified for a job at at somebody else’s dying newspaper. Heck, I got passed over for a job at a paper I’d have never considered applying to except as an alternative to unemployment (I gave this away when I got the paper’s name wrong during a conversation with an editor; I think it was my future talking).

I don’t have any regrets for my lost decade at the Merc. It was a good job; we had more joy than grief. For the last couple years I felt like Rhett Butler finally reporting for duty after the war was lost. I tried my damnedest to suck it up and take one for the team, doing work somebody had to do even when it was doing nothing to freshen up my moldy CV.

Didn’t matter, in the end: I was “on the bubble” to be bounced in the latest reduction in force. Ten years without a merit raise (much less a promotion) should’ve clued me in as to where I stood with my so-called superiors, but I was having such a fine time with my non-working life that it didn’t really matter.

What did matter was filling the hours of my non-working life with stuff I enjoyed doing. I was never a shirker at the Merc, but I made no sacrifices to get ahead in the newspaper biz. Turns out it was wiser to twin up my obsessions with hiking and blogging.

My new job is still a job — I wouldn’t do it for free, any more than I would slap headlines on stories about dead babies for free — but it has a future, unlike my previous one. We live in an unremarkable apartment complex in an unremarkable mid-size U.S. metropolitan area, but it’s cheap to live here and we’re near Melissa’s family and only a day’s drive from mine.

If you’ve been reading along at my hiking blog, you’ll have noticed the remarkable natural beauty in the state of North Carolina. It not a 365-day vacation like living in the Bay Area; weekends are fine, though.

For now I’m liking the way things have shaped up. My Mercury News years were were good while they lasted, and things got better after they were over. Hard to get too worked up over that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 am and is filed under In the news, Mangan's memoirs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.