No one tweets when an electrician changes his job (and they make more money, too!)
As hinted at here a week ago, a personal announcement: I am stepping down as editor of the National Post Comment section.
I don't get to see him much, but my oldest friend is a man named Kyle. Kyle's an electrician, a good one. He manages a whole team of other electricians now. A while back, he and I met up, as we try to do at least once a year, and I was telling him about a recent change in my career. He listened very carefully, and mentioned that he'd heard a bit about it on social media and whatnot, and then added, with a shake of his head, "No one would tweet about me changing jobs."
That comment stuck, for some reason. I've genuinely thought about it a lot. He's right. If he changed career paths entirely, or switched companies, no one would tweet about it. But the work he does is as important (or more) as the work I do, and I'm sure he's as respected (or way more) by his peers than I am. But newspapers are institutions that people are interested in more than the wiring that is literally the conduit of modern civilization, and for reasons I don't fully understand, a small but real segment of the public cares when a journalist changes jobs.
If you're a non-journo reading this, you're proving my point. I'm changing jobs. There isn't any exciting reason why, so if you're looking for a scandal or a tell-all, you can close this tab and go enjoy the rest of your day. That's not what this is. But if you are really interested to know why I'm changing jobs, well, read on.
I never had any plans to be a journalist, and never went to journalism school. I was a military history student doing an MA, with plans to go on, get a Ph.D and become an academic when I had a sudden, piercing insight. I'd been unsettled for weeks. I wasn't sleeping well. I was agitated and cranky. I knew something was bothering me, but I couldn't quite figure out what. And then, mid-shower, click! Pop! Zap! Pick your sound effect. I suddenly realized what had been bothering me: I didn't want to be an academic. I wanted to do ... well, I didn't know.
I instantly felt better; just knowing what had been bothering me was a big relief. But the sense of relief was instantly followed by a sense of uncertainty. This had been the only career plan I'd had for years. I had no backup, no Plan B. I certainly had no particular knowledge of or interest in journalism.
I've told the story of how I ended up at the Post before, so I'll skip over a lot of the details here. I had once written Post columnist Barbara Kay a letter, when I was literally a teenager, and she'd thought I had a good writing style. She'd introduced me to her son Jonathan, who ran the Post's Comment section then, and he'd thrown freelance work at me, an ad hoc summer internship, one year while I was back in Toronto from school. I also started writing for the Post's then-new Full Comment blog, for free, but on the condition that they'd edit me heavily. I wanted to learn what worked and what didn't. I remember the first real story I ever had published, about the Sunrise Propane explosion in Toronto. I loved seeing my name on that website. I couldn't believe it. Some switch in my brain flipped over and I got it. I knew, more or less, what I had to do to write a half-decent article. I began writing a lot. A lot. Not long after, a spot in the Post's Comment section opened up, and I was hired as the most-junior member of the team, and, probably the rawest, greenest hire in Canadian journalism history.
The old National Post newsroom in Don Mills. Photo Credit: SimonP.
I did everything. I answered mail, read books authors sent us to check for excerpts or review possibilities. I copy edited stories and chose photos. I even did pagination, laying out the words and pictures you'd see in the next day's paper. I made mortifying mistakes that still make me wince today. I learned an astonishing amount, astonishingly fast. And I realized I felt at home at a newspaper. In a period of only about a year, it went from a life I'd never considered to the only life I could imagine. A newspaper job is not quite like anything else, and I was lucky enough to discover that it was perfect for me. I think of that cavernous old newsroom in northern Toronto and smile, because it was a kind of home, for many good years.
I rose through the ranks pretty quickly, and was typically quite a bit younger than my peers. Every time a new opportunity presented itself, I just said yes. I think for a long time I was still so astonished to be there — or, considering the rapidly contracting revenues of print companies, that the paper itself was there at all — that it never occurred to me that I could say no. I ran blogs, wrote columns and editorials, led meetings, taught lectures, and loved it all. But what I found myself doing less and less over the years was writing.
The best job at the Post I ever had, I realize now, was when I was third in command at the Comment section, under Jon and Marni Soupcoff, the long-time deputy. I almost never had to make any decisions. I had zero paperwork. Maybe once every few months, something would come up urgently and neither of those two would be around, so I'd tell someone what to do to fix whatever the problem was. The rest of the time, I could just write. And I'd write a lot. Two columns a day. The Full Comment mill needed grist, dammit, and I was there for it. Marni left, and I became Jon's deputy. Jon left, and Andrew Coyne replaced him; I stayed on as deputy. And then Coyne stepped down, and I was it. I was the guy.
I loved it. It's a huge honour. But wow, is it ever a lot of work, and almost none of the work is writing. Or even the next-best thing: editing. My title is editor, but virtually none of the work is writing or editing. It's management. It's meetings and memos and plans and wading through reams of (digital) paperwork. It's responding to shocking volumes of email correspondence (never my strong suit). It's budgeting when the budget somehow gets smaller all the time even as the demands on it grow. It's getting up every morning hoping that things go smoothly enough that I can write something that day, and going to bed at night, exhausted and without having written a word, hoping that the next day will be different.
I don't mind management, per se. I even think I have some knack for it. But it's not all I want to do. And the grim reality is, if you work in print media in 2020, you're not just generically managing — you're very specifically managing decline, with as much dignity as possible. Which isn’t always much. The budgets are smaller every year, the staff fewer, but the demands higher, as legacy media organizations squeeze the stone ever-tighter in search of a bit more digital advertising blood. It is absolutely exhausting. I am, I confess, absolutely exhausted ... and not just because of the puppy.
Postmedia Place, in downtown Toronto.
I had left the Post for a spell, very quickly returned as a freelancer, and in summer of 2019, signed a one-year contract to return as Comment editor on a full-time basis. When the pandemic hit and everything was in total chaos, I realized that we could still be ass-deep in COVID-19 when my contract was elapsing, so I proposed to Rob Roberts, the Post's editor-in-chief, that we extend it really early, just to buy us time. He agreed, and we did. When the summer ended, I told Rob that I'd stick around to oversee a few projects that I was currently involved in, including a relaunch of the Post's Comment section, and one more I'll be able to reveal one day, but after that, I wanted to self-demote myself back to columnist.
Rob made a damn good case to keep me on as editor. It almost worked, because part of me very much wanted to be swayed. But ultimately, my desire to get back to writing was just too strong. So we agreed that we'd not extend again. My last day as the Post's Comment editor will be Nov. 13.
I love newspapers more than I can say. I love everything about them. But I love writing for them most. So I'll be staying at the Post as a columnist (and doing the odd video, as well). I'll keep doing my work at TVO.org and SiriusXM. I'll have some time to divert to some personal projects and other business opportunities that I've been neglecting. And I'll spend more time here at Code 47.
I am very much aware that this post will reach two very different audiences — readers, who are here just out of curiosity, and my fellow journalists, looking for an inside scoop on some of the exciting recent times at Postmedia, of which there have been plenty. All I can say to the first group is that you won't notice any difference after Nov. 13, except, if anything, you'll see more of me in public, since I'm diverting some of my time away from behind-the-scenes management back into writing for publication. To my journalism colleagues, you all know the toll the job takes, the challenges of this particular moment and the sometimes impossible choices we face. There really isn't much more to it than that. Nothing new happened; like I said, I chose to leave months ago (and, remarkably, we actually kept that secret until now).
I am a lucky man. I can afford to take risks that others can't, and to put my personal happiness ahead of other priorities. I'm doing that. It feels good.
Mostly good. I worked with terrific editors at the Post. I can't name them all. But I have to mention a few: Jesse Kline and Laura Morrison-Flint kept me alive with the day-to-day handling of the copy that readers see. The paper literally could not function without these two. When I leave in two weeks, the fact that you won't see much (if any) difference is mostly a testament to their professionalism and skill. But more than that, they're good people. Not once — not once — have I ever shown up to work, in person or virtually, and not been glad to see them. You need a sense of humour, a thick skin and near-infinite reserves of patience to last long at a paper today. They've got all that and more. I am going to miss them more than I can say.
Rob Roberts isn't just the Post's editor in chief. He's my friend. He's been my friend for years. He's an excellent editor and an even better person. His heart is enormous. He loves the paper and the people who work for it, and he has literally inexhaustible supplies of energy, enthusiasm and good cheer. I honestly don't know how he does it, but he does. Every day. I also know that he dies inside a little bit every time the Post has a bad day — and believe me, there aren't a lot of good days in print media in 2020. He and I have butted heads many times, but never once in anger, and always — always — because he wanted to be nicer, calmer and more trusting than I was recommending in any given crisis. I sometimes worry his own good nature will be his undoing. But you know what? He is what he is. And what he is is a genuinely good human being. And I don't say that lightly — I think a lot of humans are bad. He will be happy, always, because he's a happy person. And he'll be a good person always because I honestly don't think he could be otherwise. Even if he tried, which I often begged him to do.
William Watson has been my right arm, and left arm, and both lobes of my brain (I'll stop listing body parts now, Bill, don't worry), at the Financial Post. And he's been a constant source of good ideas, good advice and good judgment on any matter I brought to him during the time we worked together. From time to time, he's also just listened to me vent, which helped me a lot more than it did him, I'd wager. When I told him this week that I was leaving, not only did he understand why, he also gave me the perfect way of summing up how I've felt these last few months, succinctly capturing what I'd struggled to fully conceptualize — I was "burning my stock of human capital at an unsustainable rate." Bill had it exactly right — a professional economist, he had the perfect way of describing how I felt. I'll miss him a hell of a lot, too.
There are others. Many. Values colleagues, and a rare breed — true friends. They know who they are. I will miss them, but they know where to find me.
So there you have it — all the info and barely half the length of Glen Greenwald's note earlier this week. Honest and (relatively) concise. That's how we party here at Code 47.
I still probably should have been an electrician, though. Those guys are making a killing.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney
