You Deserve The Dignity Of A Stable Job

Without anyone in your industry sneering at you while you get laid off.

Digital journalism: What’s not to love about it? The pay is medium to bad. If you’re not one of like 4 chosen people at any given outlet your job likely does not contain a lot of promise of upward mobility. Your publication, and everyone else’s, has likely existed for the most part at the whims of VC funding, PE owners, or capricious tech platforms. You probably have been the subject of at least one bad-faith targeted harassment campaign if you’ve made the mistake of writing an article the wrong group of bored angry people happen to read. If the rest of this doesn’t drive you out, layoffs will.

A few years ago I wrote about the media apocalypse of 2019, which spared no one at the time and feels downright quaint now. I spent hours listening to the stories of laid-off workers, none of whom had much hope for their industry and did not leave me feeling very good about my own prospects. At the time, I was some combination of permalancing/freelancing/generally not having a safety net under me; earlier in the year I had taken a job that I ended up not staying at for very long and for legal reasons I still can’t discuss in depth. When I took the job someone wrote a sneering blog about everyone who had taken a job there, taking shots at each of us. Apparently there was not really very much to say about me, since this writer speculated I had left my ~cushy~ legacy media job (lot of assumptions being made here…