I was never going. The newspaper was the only institution I knew, and one I still love. But I left—first taking an extended leave of absence to teach journalism, and then quitting last year. No buyout necessary. I didn’t leave solely because of the desperate mood, distracted leaders, or customer satisfaction tone that I believed unnecessarily complicated news judgment. But those things did make it easier.

How badly would I miss being part of a newsroom? I wondered that aloud to a friend who also was considering leaving his newspaper. His response: “Newspapers aren’t the strong community institutions they used to be. They aren’t the places we came to work at.”

In other words, we aren’t leaving the institution as much as the institution has left us. As the business model has slipped away, some of the core values that energize journalists have, too. I hope it’s a short hiatus. Those values are vital to the newsroom—and the business.




_________________________________






The steady drip of layoffs and buyouts, slowly desiccating once-vibrant newsrooms around the country, has also produced a reservoir of anger, sadness, fear, uncertainty—even some cautious optimism here and there—among reporters and editors who invested years, decades in some cases, of their lives to print journalism. We’ve asked anyone so inclined to channel these emotions, not into rant—although there will be a bit of that—but rather into reflection on what went wrong, and where we might go from here. We will publish these periodically under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.

  • 1
  • 2