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There’s no teacher like misfortune, and I’ve learned plenty since last Christmas.

Mainly I learned that time punishes the dawdler, but luck can rescue the patient.

I gave 22 years of my working life to a doomed industry. I had an excuse for the first few years before the Web exploded on the scene, but everything after that came down to my natural attraction to the path of least resistance. Plain old greed played a role, too: Sure, I’d have loved to have taken a job working on somebody’s Web site, but they all seemed to require huge pay cuts that didn’t interest me.

So I talked myself into believing it was OK to stick it out with my reliable union job with its reliable 2% pay raises and better-than average health benefits. I had a job which came so naturally to me that I could’ve kept at it every day till I drew my last breath or they dragged me away from the computer screen, whichever came first. I had my 37.5 hours a week, five weeks paid vacation, and days off on my birthday and anniversary of hire. It seemed like plenty.

Only one problem with plenty: it never lasts.

Signs that the pool of plenty was drying up started emerging about five years ago, when they stopped replacing my copy desk co-workers after they moved on. By the summer of ‘09, the last of the pool could fill a teaspoon.

What happened next has already been told here, but to summarize: I learned in August that the paycut I had long avoided was going to happen after all, and that I was on the list of newsroom expendables. Learning I wasn’t the go-to guy I had imagined myself to be was one part sucker punch, one part wake-up call. Hurt at first, but when my breath returned I knew that in hard times, the expendable go first. With newspapers facing nothing but hard times in the years ahead, I knew that even if I kept my job this time, I’d lose it the next.

So I bailed. I had no prospects beyond a cash cushion, good credit and a few connections. Melissa and I moved across the continent, rented a cheap two-bedroom apartment down the road from her mom’s place, and dug in for a long stretch of austerity that seemed certain in light of how everybody else was faring in this economy.

Fortune smiled within weeks, it turned out. There were two reasons why I lucked out: a) somebody I knew needed to hire somebody, and I was in no position to get picky; and b) while I was lazy all those years, I was not blind.

I started my hiking blog to prove I could build a niche Web site that might attract people interested in my skills. When the job offers did not start pouring in, I started looking for ways to make the site pay.

One of the things I learned along the way was that a site called Trailspace.com was offering this nifty gear-comparison feature and using affiliate marketing links to pay the freight. I tried adding affiliate marketing links to my hiking blog and barely made a dime. Every time I turned around, I was seeing evidence that everybody in the affiliate game in the outdoor world was in line behind Trailspace.

In the past year or so I calculated that I could starve for the next 10 years trying to catch up with Trailspace, or simplify things by getting hired there. What I’m doing is a lot like copy editing — making sure certain rules of usage are applied uniformly and accurately across a publication — but there’s one essential difference: the most important part of my job is not just burnishing my boss’s prospects for respectability. It’s putting money in his pockets.

So what’s this got to do with Christmas? Well, yesterday I learned I’m getting my first holiday bonus since 1992. The bump in my bank account is nice, but the real bonus is knowing that the folks who pay my salary appreciate my work. I never had this in 22 years of newspapering. The work was fun and interesting, but we were interchangeable cogs in a vast news mechanism. They cut our staff by 75 percent and the paper still came out. We were not worthless, but we were not worth replacing, either.

That’s no kind of business for any Bob Cratchit to be in; none the Scrooges who own newspapers will ever wake up on Christmas morning determined to rescue Tiny Tim. They’ll be lucky to be able to keep the lights on.

My Christmas wish for 2009 is that all my old pals in the newspaper game find the will and the means to contribute their work to companies that deserve it, wherever that work may be. I’m proof that it can be done.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under 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.