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Miles (not verified) says:
Fresh out of an Ivy League school with nothing but raw ambition, I started my professional career as a fact-checker in New York in 1995. Exciting, for sure, but I found myself somewhat frustrated with how things functioned (i.e. on anything but merit). Perhaps I should have waited it out and patiently risen up the ranks and worked with truly great journalists.
But I guess I will never know. I only spent a year there before heading off to graduate school and then out to the West Coast to ride the wave of the Internet. I spent some of the best years of my career writing great stuff about the irrational exuberance--at a relatively young age. Life was good. (An editorial assistant wrote a novel on the experience at our business magazine. It was hilarious.) But then it all came to an abrupt end. And I have been trying to cobble together something of a career ever since.
I am now 34 and the editor of a small regional magazine. It's fulfilling to a certain extent and some people I know say I should be thankful to be employed, but I wonder why I am stuck here. 'Cuz I am stuck here. I really don't know where my next step is. Will I ever become the superstar editor I hoped to work hard to become? With so much media and no one really running the show (I think back to that scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheean asks a young Laurence Fishburne who is in charge, and he replies "I thought that was you?"), I wonder how the industry will truly regulate itself. It seems everyone and their brother has a different sense of what good writing and journalism is. Uninhibited blogging is embarrassing, yet we're told that this medium is the way of the future.
I sometimes wonder why I am still at it. I've got a family now, and all I think about is leaving the profession entirely to instill some stability in my life. Yet I always end up convincing myself that this is the profession for me, no matter how bad the industry is. It's like I am a glutton for punishment. East Coast bias, socioeconomic bias, age bias, you name it, it has this industry hamstrung. Can't we all just focus on what makes good writing and journalism, and say "screw you" to the forces that try to lead us astray?
This time of year brings out every college student desperate for employment (either full-time or summer internship). Because I work in a vacation destination, I get a lot of the latter. Lately, I feel like a hypocrite telling these kids, who are just like I was in 1995, that they should go into magazines. I am beyond saving. But I feel sorry for these 22-year-olds. They don't deserve this crap.
Fresh out of an Ivy League school with nothing but raw ambition, I started my professional career as a fact-checker in New York in 1995. Exciting, for sure, but I found myself somewhat frustrated with how things functioned (i.e. on anything but merit). Perhaps I should have waited it out and patiently risen up the ranks and worked with truly great journalists.
But I guess I will never know. I only spent a year there before heading off to graduate school and then out to the West Coast to ride the wave of the Internet. I spent some of the best years of my career writing great stuff about the irrational exuberance--at a relatively young age. Life was good. (An editorial assistant wrote a novel on the experience at our business magazine. It was hilarious.) But then it all came to an abrupt end. And I have been trying to cobble together something of a career ever since.
I am now 34 and the editor of a small regional magazine. It's fulfilling to a certain extent and some people I know say I should be thankful to be employed, but I wonder why I am stuck here. 'Cuz I am stuck here. I really don't know where my next step is. Will I ever become the superstar editor I hoped to work hard to become? With so much media and no one really running the show (I think back to that scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheean asks a young Laurence Fishburne who is in charge, and he replies "I thought that was you?"), I wonder how the industry will truly regulate itself. It seems everyone and their brother has a different sense of what good writing and journalism is. Uninhibited blogging is embarrassing, yet we're told that this medium is the way of the future.
I sometimes wonder why I am still at it. I've got a family now, and all I think about is leaving the profession entirely to instill some stability in my life. Yet I always end up convincing myself that this is the profession for me, no matter how bad the industry is. It's like I am a glutton for punishment. East Coast bias, socioeconomic bias, age bias, you name it, it has this industry hamstrung. Can't we all just focus on what makes good writing and journalism, and say "screw you" to the forces that try to lead us astray?
This time of year brings out every college student desperate for employment (either full-time or summer internship). Because I work in a vacation destination, I get a lot of the latter. Lately, I feel like a hypocrite telling these kids, who are just like I was in 1995, that they should go into magazines. I am beyond saving. But I feel sorry for these 22-year-olds. They don't deserve this crap.