parting thoughts

Parting Thoughts: John Biemer

‘You only live twice’

July 28, 2008

If you had told me a few years ago that I’d be applying to medical school in 2008, I would’ve said you’re nuts.

By then, I had worked as a journalist for a decade. I had interviewed presidential candidates campaigning through Iowa, Kosovar Albanians in a refugee camp in the Balkans, and survivors of a deadly tornado hours after it struck a rural Illinois town. I had covered hearings on Capitol Hill and murder trials in farm communities. I went searching for bald eagles on the Mississippi River at the crack of dawn.

No, this is not your typical path to medical school. But that is exactly what I’m trying to do, one year after voluntarily stepping out of the Chicago Tribune newsroom.

Already, I have completed post-baccalaureate pre-med courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. I’m most of the way through an intensive summer course in the dreaded organic chemistry prerequisite. I’ve taken the MCAT. I’ve applied to ten medical schools. My fingers are crossed.

I certainly didn’t plan it this way. Not when I was writing for my high school newspaper or majoring in English in college. Not when I took an entry-level job in the CNN Headline News newsroom, or when I moved to Bosnia as part of an effort to start an English-language newspaper after the war. Not when I was filing copy for The Associated Press in Des Moines, Baltimore, and Annapolis, or through most of my four years as a Metro reporter for the Tribune.

I suppose journalism is no longer the way any of us pictured it. I sent my first e-mail and first surfed the Internet just after I graduated college in 1995. Who knew what a profound impact that technology would have on my budding career? A decade later, I feel like the Chesapeake Bay watermen I covered for the AP who have been forced to build new lives as the blue crabs disappeared—only for us, classified ads are the endangered species.

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Reading Romenesko was a daily depressant, but also a reality check. For a while, it seemed other papers were being hit harder than the Tribune. Then came Sam Zell and his deal, which left us, the “employee-owners,” so deeply in debt. Despite his insistence otherwise, there was little doubt that massive layoffs would follow.

Even if you survived the cuts, what’s next? More frenzied filing of unfinished stories to the Web site. Shorter, shallower, press-release stories. More hyperlocal focus on fires and crime, more wire copy and pop culture. Taking notes in the field while balancing a video camera. None of this appealed to me. Unless something dramatic comes along to shift the paradigm—public financing, nonprofit newspapers—I can’t imagine this job getting better because of these changes.

And as all this is happening, life for me has been moving on. I got married, had a son, and my wife was expecting again when Zell entered my life. Suddenly, a career choice that had seemed stimulating and romantic as a young, single man had become risky, and, frankly, self-indulgent. There are two main ways to pull your weight as a parent—through your time or your resources—and with a newspaper reporter’s salary and work schedule, I was not contributing enough of either. Nobody expects to get rich as a journalist, but at a certain point you realize that for your family’s sake you might’ve been better off becoming a plumber.

Odds were, I concluded, that the industry woes or the salary would force me out of journalism within a decade. So, I could wait for that breaking point or take action on my own. I’m thirty-four, so I have more options than I will later on. However, to make such a jump, you are forced to think as if you’re eighteen again: What do I want to be when I grow up? What would my fifty-year-old self want me to have done at this juncture? And what am I, as a longtime journalist, even qualified for?

I had to consider what I did best. At AP and the Tribune, I had been assigned beats covering politics, but about half my reporting time was open to general assignment—and often I could pursue whatever interested me. Over time, I found myself repeatedly gravitating to science stories, eventually reaching a point where it eclipsed any of the other subjects I covered. And when you are fascinated by a subject on a personal level, you work harder at it because you are more motivated and your curiosity drives you further.

The subjects I interviewed for these stories—biologists, doctors, geologists, meteorologists, and more—often complimented me for quickly grasping fairly complicated scientific topics and explaining them in simple and objective terms that a reader could understand. In the end, of all my stories in journalism, my work on the sciences shined the most.

There are aspects of a career in medicine that cross over with the appeal of journalism—the lifelong learning, the intellectual challenge, and the feeling that through your work you may be helping others and perhaps making the world a better place. Ethics, objectivity, and accuracy are crucial in both, as well as the ability to communicate clearly. It may be an unorthodox path to becoming a doctor, but I think my journalism skills will serve me well.

Still, this was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. When all my college friends rushed off to law school, I chose journalism. I love reporting and writing good stories. I wanted to be a witness to history. I wanted to see the world. I wanted life to be constantly fascinating. You only live once.

Just writing this piece reminds me of all that—and in some ways, I’m still torn. But this is not the same field I entered and I am not the same person.

To a young, aspiring journalist, particularly if he or she is unattached, I still say: go for it. Reporting will exist on some level, for some people. It’s still one of the most interesting jobs in the world. But watch your back. Constantly reassess your situation. The people who pay your salary are far more concerned about your byline count than the person behind the byline.

The road ahead for me won’t be easy, but I am fortunate. I have a knack for science—and my post-bac classes have confirmed that. I also have a patient and encouraging ex-journalist wife with a stable enough job that I can make this leap of faith. If it works, I will be thirty-nine when I graduate from medical school—undoubtedly, among the oldest students in my class. Too old? I hope not. The train may be leaving the station, but if I sprint, I think I can still jump on board.

You only live twice.

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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 one per day, under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.

John Biemer is a former Metro reporter for the Chicago Tribune.