Get a Life - Brief Article

Workforce, April, 2001 by Carroll Lachnit

Managing Editor

The journalism profession draws an odd lot of people. In the newsroom of any daily newspaper, you'll find driven, charming, outgoing reporters who could bond with a porcupine and extract its poignant life story by deadline, but can't keep their marriages together. There are wordsmiths who craft and polish sentences as if they were priceless pieces of jewelry, but can't meet a deadline, no matter what. You'll meet copy editors who can detail the use of the subjunctive voice, but can't look you in the eye in a casual coffee-room conversation.

What newspapers foster among these quirk-filled folks is a sense that you, as a reporter or editor, will find your life's validation in only one place: your work. You might have a spouse. You might have children. But your life belongs to journalism.

I believed that, for a time. I worked 18 hours straight on more than one occasion. I lingered in the newsroom after deadline to exchange gossip and journalistic craft. I commiserated with writers over bad editors, and when I was an editor, I sniped at those wayward children, the writers. I bonded with sources. I lived for the rush of a front-page byline. I suffered when our competitor beat us on a story.

When a commercial passenger jet crashed into a neighborhood one sunny weekend, I didn't think twice before reporting to the city desk for my assignment. A reporter who spent her two days off on a boat, blissfully tuned out of the world and bereft of a radio or TV, was treated like a pariah on Monday. Unavailable to serve the news goddess? That's unacceptable.

With a history like that, I read Shari Caudron's story, "The Myth of Job Happiness," with special interest, recognizing in it the lures that journalism set for me. Unlike some other businesses, newspapers don't claim that they'll make their reporters or editors happy (such folks are incapable of being content--that's why they went into journalism in the first place). But newspapers do offer the rush of the daily deadline, and some people flock to that. I bought into the idea that a job should supply excitement, recognition, and the company of brothers and sisters who understood me as no one else did. The paycheck? Sure, it was important. But that wasn't really why I was there.

Most people in journalism eventually wise up, as I did. The idea that a newsroom is your family begins to crumble after a few years. People defect to other tribes. They have the nerve to get married--sometimes to non-newspaper people (horrors). Reporters and editors learn that a newspaper, even a Sunday edition fat with ads, won't keep you warm at night. So they leave for more humane jobs. Or, if they stay, they learn to ignore the editors who by guilt or guile try to get them to stay late to cover the crisis du jour.

Even in workplaces that aren't frenetic newsrooms, such epiphanies are important. Work shouldn't be the only focus of life. Making yourself dependent on it for all your emotional sustenance is asking for trouble. In a profession like HR, which serves the company in a way that's not quite like any other function, that's advice worth keeping in mind. You can't make people love their jobs. You can only help them work better. With any luck, they'll stop focusing on work as a font of all true joy, and go home to see if they can find some happiness there.