Working Man

There are many things that make me feel old these days. Here's one of them: Today marked the 20th anniversary of my first day in the working world.

On June 5, 1989, I began work at the Peabody Times, the newspaper where I was an intern the previous summer. I had just graduated from the University of New Hampshire with an English/Journalism degree and was full of youthful enthusiasm. I had a blast during my internship, although I had to practically beg my editor to let me cover stories because the previous intern had quit after a couple of weeks (they managed to convince him to come back, but he hated every second of it). I was able to get some decent clips during the internship and headed back to college for my senior year. I impressed the editors in the head office enough to get offered a job a month before graduation.

My first story was a "man on the street" piece, a regular feature called "Street Talk" that none of the reporters liked doing, because you had to walk up to random people in downtown Peabody and get their opinions on a particular topic. And you had to take their photos with a point-and-shoot camera. And give out these lame "Street Talk" pencils; I think I still have a couple somewhere. The Street Talk topic that day was about the historic protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, that had occurred the previous day. Of course, a couple of people didn't know what I was talking about and a few didn't want anything to do with me, but eventually I got enough folks to talk to me. And that was the start of my illustrious career in journalism.

I lasted another six years at the paper. Four of them were in Peabody under four different editors, working first as a general assigment reporter, then covering the schools beat for two years, and then a final year as City Hall reporter. I then moved over to the Beverly Times, the sister paper of the Peabody paper and the head office of the four-paper Essex County Newspapers chain. I was county reporter for a while before becoming a layout editor for nine months. Alas, the 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift didn't suit my nocturnal ways and I found myself constantly sleepy and developing what I thought was an ulcer. I also missed reporting and writing, so when a reporting job covering the courts opened up and I went for it and got it. That was a fun gig for a year and a half, until ECN bought the rival Salem News and merged it with the Beverly and Peabody papers. I found myself reassigned to cover Marblehead, sitting in boring selectmen's meetings I thought I'd left behind.

I started looking for another job and after a month, found one at a small publishing company in, of all places, Marblehead. And so I left the world of newspapers behind for steady hours and a job writing about healthcare. It was a tough adjustment at first, not just mastering the new subject matter, but also just the fact that I was sitting in an office all day instead of driving out to cover stories. It took a few months and for a while, I was wondering if I had made a mistake. But it ended up working out okay in the end and I'm still working there today, albeit with a two-year departure from '99-'01 to work at a dotcom.

Coming out of college, my plan was to work a couple of years in Peabody and move on to a bigger paper elsewhere, eventually landing a job in a big-city paper like the Boston Globe. I actually interviewed at the Globe in '93 for an internship and it seemed to go well, but I think I blew it when I was meeting with then-editor Ben Bradlee Jr. and at the end of the interview, he asked me if I had any questions. And I had done fine until that point, but I was nervous about not having a question, so I just blurted out a stupid question about whether there were health benefits. Of course there weren't, it was a friggin' internship, and I didn't care about benefits. I just wanted the gig, because something like 70% of interns used to get hired on staff back then, or so I was told. Bradlee looked at me like I had three heads and said no, and I was sent back to the intern coordinator I had initially met with. And I fear that my stupid last impression may have cost me a gig with the Globe. Two and a half years later, I was out of the business. But looking at the state of the newspaper biz nowadays, maybe it was a good thing I blew that interview.