Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, posted a fascinating account of how he “got bitten by the journalism bug” in 1976, but then “screwed up” his chance to be a journalist. It’s a bit of mystery story tinged with late 20th century reportorial idealism. While a student editor at this college paper in Buffalo, Rosen convinced the local Courier-Express to hire to hire him as a summer “replacement reporter.” He had a “magical” experience, writing more than ten front-page stories for the paper and generally excelling at his job. At the end of Rosen’s assignment, the paper’s editor, Douglas Turner, asked Rosen to quit school to work at the paper. Rosen declined, but the editor promised him a job upon his graduation the following year.
Four months before the anticipated start date, Rosen started to wonder whether or not he had been wise to accept the first job offered to him. So, he scanned the ads in Editor & Publisher and applied for one that read, “Northeast Daily: General Assignment Reporter.” Rosen was unfazed when he received no response, thinking he would simply fall back on the promised job at the Courier-Express. When numerous calls to Turner went unreturned, however, Rosen grew desperate and confused. He went to the newspaper and headed into the editor’s office to ask what was amiss. Turner would not look directly at him and, without further explanation, called security to have Rosen escorted from the building (in an interesting response sent to Rosen, Turner says he does not recall doing this).
Rosen moved to Washington, D.C. where he failed to launch a freelance career. He then enrolled in New York University, where he earned his PhD and became a lifelong student of, and eventually renowned expert on, “media ecology.” It wasn’t until a few years later that a friend who still worked at the Courier-Express helped Rosen solve the mystery of his unceremonious banishment from the paper. It turned out that the job he had applied for at the unnamed “Northeast Daily” was, in fact, the very same one he had been promised. Turner had posted the opening to fulfill a legal requirement, and when he received Rosen’s bet-hedging application, he took it as an act of disloyalty.
On his Twitter feed, Rosen noted that he had never written about this story before, and we are glad he did.
And it makes us want to ask: Have you made any pivotal career mistakes (bloopers, might be a better word in Rosen’s case), and where have they led you?
My story is also about a firing, and it also occurred before I got my first paycheck as a reporter. It happened at the University of Missouri's journalism school, which I attended after deducing that driving a taxi was not going to do it for the long term. I taught myself to type just days before the semester began.
Students at Missouri work for a real newspaper, the Columbia Missourian. Someone told me that at J-school everybody got a "beat," whatever that was, and that a good beat was Stephens College, a school for women, so I signed up for it. I walked around the Stephens campus for days, eyes wide open, but did not spy any "news," whatever that was.
The editor/professor was a man named Don, a short fellow who strutted across the stage when he lectured to a hundred or so of us on class days, and who served as the managing editor of the paper. A couple of weeks in he announced that he was going to fire a few of us. First up was me. It seems Stephens College had raised its tuition, and that was "news." Who knew?
I was ordered to march out of the room. I happened to be sitting far in the back so this took a while. On the way down, Don announced that he would replace me with someone who did more than fool around with the girls at Stephens College. It was a long walk.
I needed a plan. I still had to pass Don's course, but wanted a way to do so without interaction with the loathsome Don. So: I got into that newspaper through every door that Don did not control. I did some long stuff for the Sunday magazine, worked with photo people on their photo stories, sports, features, whatever. I learned a lot, and I avoided Don like the plague.
In the end, Don reviewed everyone's clips, one on one, to determine the final grade. I remember handing him my notebook full of pasted in clips without a word. I think it had a picture of a lion on the front, but more important, it was reasonably thick, and some of those clips, I knew, were OK. I'm certain he wanted to fail me, but he knew he couldn't. We both knew it. I believe I got a D, and I was delighted.
#1 Posted by Mike Hoyt, CJR on Wed 29 Sep 2010 at 09:54 AM
Mine is less a career-defining error than a lesson-learned story.
When I was 22 I landed a job at a glossy newspaper insert magazine in Sydney, and within a couple of months was assigned to my first feature story. I was terribly excited. It was nothing too taxing: a story on how much certain outrageous things would cost you (eg., a billboard on the busiest road in Sydney, a plot in the most beautiful (and full) cemetery in Sydney).
So when the paper came out on the Thursday, I was giddy on the bus to work as I saw some people reading the piece, and I got a bit of a thrill walking the city streets and seeing the magazine in stacks at newsstands. I was walking on air by the time I got into the office.
When I checked my voice mail at work, I had a new message. It was from my high school English teacher, and it was brief: "It's interment, not interNment."
Turns out, in referring to that lovely cemetery, I had written about confinement, and not burial. Ever since, I've been a stickler for spell-checking myself. That's not to say things haven't slipped through the cracks since.
#2 Posted by Joel Meares, CJR on Wed 29 Sep 2010 at 11:23 AM
My Woulda, Coulda, Pivotal Career mistake was a douzy.
A long, long time ago, I was an intern at CJR, It was like being a bat-boy for the Yanks... working with writers like Wren Weschler from The New Yorker. Just answering the phone was a thrill... Fred Friendly is on the line. That first paycheck from CJR for writing an article. Incredulous that people actually get paid for writing. Then with the encouragement of an Associate Editor at CJR, a guy by the name of Mike Hoyt, I applied to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and somehow got accepted, mainly due to Mike's kind letter of recommendation.
Holding that acceptance letter like Charlie holding the Golden Ticket, I had that nagging sense I was no journalist. I could barely type 5 words a minute, I often jumbled things up, the braces on my teeth whistled when I said words with an S.
Then for some reason I declined my acceptance to Columbia's School of Journalism and moved up to Boston to play drums in a rock band with my brother. I figured I could get a job at a Boston daily and play in the clubs at night. How wrong I was! I ended up working odd jobs here and there as a darkroom technician developing black and white photos in the days before Photoshop or as a van driver.
How many young aspiring journalists would have jumped at that acceptance letter I often thought, one-time working as a carpenter, stepping on a nail. Where would life have taken me if I had gotten my masters in journalism?
Eventually, ten years later I got a job as an associate editor at a trade magazine then got promoted to editor. Then after that my band-mate brother suggested we launch a magazine together, an off-road magazine called Low-Range. We lasted about five years before the financial crisis shut us down. That was two years ago. I think John Lennon said it best, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."
#3 Posted by Dan Sheridan, CJR on Thu 30 Sep 2010 at 09:01 PM
It would be more accurate to describe my experience as career ending. I had been a reporter at the paper in Fort Worth, TX, for nearly 8 years when I started to make a series of errors. At the time I felt depressed and burned out. Long story short, an editor warned me to stop making errors, I did not and I was let go. I was 56 at the time, which was June 2008. All of a sudden, the 20 plus years I had spent in journalism at the Fort Worth paper and other papers -- all that was over. I left the Fort Worth area and moved in with my mother, who lives in the Des Moines area. I worked for about a year at Target. A few weeks ago, I moved to Mazatlan, Mexico to help a friend run an English language bookstore. I write about my experiences every day in my journal. I have not made my way out of the forest. John Kirsch
#4 Posted by John Kirsch, CJR on Sun 3 Oct 2010 at 07:30 AM
I saw this blog entry today as I was surfing Google. The article errs in saying that I asked Mr Rosen to quit college and come to work at the newspaper. On the contrary, I irritated some existing staffers by insisting that any new full-time hires such as the one described above had a bachelor's degree. The policy worked very well by bringing in stars such as Mike Hiltzik, Jo-Ann Armao, Nancy Schwerzler, and Carol Stevens. I also explained that the probable reason for our not hiring was that he was a defense witness in a pending anti-trust suit against a competitor.
#5 Posted by Douglas L Turner, CJR on Sat 9 Oct 2010 at 03:12 PM