A news designer’s farewell to newspapers.
This week has been a roller coaster of emotions. While my last day at the Miami Herald was December 26th, Monday marked the first official day of my unemployment. I went to the office one final time to sign a severance agreement and returned home to find myself struggling to navigate the State of Florida unemployment website. It was the first week my time off didn’t feel like vacation. I spent Tuesday sorting through years of newspaper clips, scattered around three or four different hard drives. On Wednesday, I started applying for jobs. For the first time in my life, I found myself without a plan.
By the time I graduated from the University of Miami in 2006, I had already been working part-time at the Miami Herald and had two great internships under my belt. Before I began my job search, I was offered a six-month news design contact in Milwaukee. After my first real fall and winter, my contract at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was up. Again, before I started to plan my next move, another job fell in my lap. As I was digging my car out of ten feet of snow, I got a phone call from a friend in Austin. A chance to thaw out in the Texas Hill Country? I was game. The Austin American-Statesman turned out to be a wonderful place to work and I made many great friends there. After a year and a half, I found myself still unable to call Austin home. What was missing? Family. So I hatched a plan to return to the Miami Herald. I stayed in contact with the graphics editor and despite the layoffs that were underway, we were able to secure me a spot on the presentation desk just one week before the second round of layoffs began. I was home, and regardless of how difficult things had quickly become in the industry, I was happy.
In the short time that I was back at the Miami Herald, I found a new passion for journalism. As I first started out, I thought of myself as a designer, who specialized in news. After a few years, I learned that I was much more than that. I was a journalist who had a passion for visual storytelling, and that design was just one of the tools available to me (and one that I am extremely passionate about). Perhaps I didn’t express this new passion in the best light, as my new bosses came to think that I had grown unhappy with my job. It’s important to note that while I was working at the Herald, the news design desk had shrunk from 15 people to ten (and now eight), but while our top editors had made lofty plans initially to compress the paper (and therefore reduce the work load), none of those plans came to fruition. We quickly found ourselves multitasking and most of us doing the work of two people or more. Stress and morale were at thier lowest.
As this new passion for journalism manifested itself in social media and news video, I was not awarded any time in my schedule to work on them. I did most of it between sending pages or I’d come in early or stay late when I had the energy to do so. I can’t fault my bosses for not allowing me more of a chance to spend on my new interests, they were in a precarious position to begin with. They supported me as much as they could afford to.
That brings me to today. While I don’t know what my next step is quite yet, I am looking forward to life outside of newspapers. And hopefully, I will still be able to call myself a journalist.
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Comments ( 4 )
Great post Lori! This captures exactly what I went through back in July 2008, and what I’m dealing with now. Even if you aren’t working in newspapers, those journalism skills never go away and are quite valuable. How many people can say they dealt with dealing hard deadlines everyday?
Good luck!
Ellen Lynch added these pithy words on
Jan 10 10 at
11:39 PM
Lori you express very well your passion for design and journalism. Kept your head high and know that something good will come to you this year. Wishing you the best of luck and I enjoyed knowing that you were the one that designed the front page when I read the actual paper.
Blanca added these pithy words on
Jan 11 10 at
12:28 AM
Lori, you can be proud that you are one of the generation and one who has skills and knowledge that cross boundaries between “new” media and traditional media. The boundary is changing all the time, traditional media is not standing still, and new media gets old fast. So keep learning. In the meantime, as you are a journalist with a passion for visual storytelling, I’m looking forward to seeing more cool videos from you, like your Lucky In Vegas video. Good stuff (wouldn’t you want to highlight it on your site here somewhere? Just asking….) Do more. : )
Peace!
@pbarbanes added these pithy words on
Jan 11 10 at
10:02 AM
