📝 So you're a journalist who's been laid off
Next steps after media job loss: Context Collapse #189
So you’re a journalist who’s just been laid off. It sucks.
Getting laid off sucks in any industry. However, when you work in media—a field not known for, err, financial health or sound decisionmaking by executives—it’s a little bit tougher.
Working in media for a long time (I run a comms consulting company now, used to be a copywriter at a large ad agency, worked as a reporter for Fast Company from 2010-2017, freelanced for Los Angeles Times op-ed section, Wired, Esquire, lots of other places), I know what a proper shitshow news and media outlets can be.
But remember: When you keep your cool when everyone around you is losing theirs, you have an advantage.
Here’s what to do when you lose your media job. But first… a word from our sponsor.
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Step 1: Mourn and get your brain together.
Losing your job sucks. Especially when you haven’t lost it due to you doing a bad job at your job or otherwise messing up. Especially when it’s just because you’re a line item in a XLS being made by your boss’ boss’ boss who wants to make some investors happy.
Separate this step into the logistics crap and the personal crap.
Logistics crap: Sign up for unemployment. Make a budget for yourself (I’m a big fan of You Need A Budget and there are plenty of free alternatives available). Figure out where there’s fat in your budget like unnecessary streaming subscriptions, restaurant meals or non-necessary shopping and cut that stuff out. Do math on how long your severance pay will last.
Personal crap: Get those gddamn feelings out. Go lift some weights. Go to the bar with some friends. Go to a coffeeshop with one friend. Cry in a dark room. Play Xbox and stare deeply into the void for six hours. Your job lost, it sucked, get ready for the next step.
Step 2: Take a job skills inventory.
Something that’s very specific for journalists: They underestimate their skill sets, assume their skill sets aren’t transferable to other jobs and unfortunately skew towards impostor syndrome.
I highly recommend taking a job skills inventory to figure out exactly what you did day to day at your last job that will help you find another job. The Community College of Vermont has a skills assessment worksheet that hits all the sweet spots; I highly recommend going through it.
For instance, a writer working for a media outlet that publishes daily typically has:
Experience interviewing and speaking with the general public
Experience conducting independent research and both quantiative and qualitative analysis
Experience with Google Workspace suite, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud
Basic video editing experience
Basic graphic design experience
Basic audio editing experience
Social media experience in a workplace setting
Sales/persuasive communication training from successfully pitching editors on stories
Again, do your own skills assessment and figure out what your IRL skills are.
Step 3: Figure out your needs.
There’s no one-size-fits-all for getting laid off from your job. Someone living in an expensive roommate situation in Brooklyn is going to have a very different experience from someone with their own home in a low-cost-of-living city or someone with a spouse who’s also lost their job.
The budget we mentioned in step 1 is going to be very helpful here. You’re figuring out your future… and that shit is important.
What are your plans for the future besides having money for groceries and spending the afternoon on TikTok? Where do you want to live? What is your baseline for budgeting? How much money do you have saved up to float the lean times? If you have to take an in-between job, can you swallow your pride and work Doordash or Uber or Amazon for a while? (Hint: You can.)
Have a plan ready for your next 90 days that will keep you busy as you job hunt. Speaking of which…
Step 4: Figure out your career path.
Do you want to stay in media or do you want to move on to another industry? Or, phrased another way, can you stay in media or do you have to move on to another industry?
Journalism is a great industry. Being a journalist was the most fun I ever had in the workplace in my life. I got to see the positive effects of my work every day when readers emailed me that my articles helped them talk to their doctor more easily or a founder wrote that my article helped them get a funding round or an entrepreneur wrote that my article helped them avoid purchasing a dud product from their business. Being a journalist is a great job. But it’s also low-paying and journalism jobs are hard to find in many markets.
No worries either way. Speaking personally, I switched from journalism to advertising after it became clear that every potential publication I could work for was slashing budgets, putting mid- and high-career talent on listicle duty and creating work situations that would make my own work look bad in the process (Which you don’t want!). So I moved to advertising and to comms consulting from there and made much more money and became much happier in the process. So it goes.
The traditional pathway for ex-journalists has been moving into public relations. Which is great! If you work in journalism you know a PR person or 10, so I won’t rehash that here. What I will say is that if you’re a mission-driven journalist, you would most likely be more comfortable doing comms for a non-profit (or, alternately, joining a politics-oriented comms shop) than working at an agency.
But all PR jobs aren’t the same. Working at a large agency like Edelman is much different than working at a smaller agency with a handful of clients. Working in a primarily client-facing role is different from primarily working on videos and press releases which is different from being focused on meetings with journalists and opinion leaders. Figure out what you like about journalism and how it could apply to PR.
There are other careers too. I know plenty of journalists who have happily transitioned to marketing jobs (there’s also a strong argument to be made that PR, marketing and advertising are the same nowadays… but that’s another post). If you go down the marketing path, I strongly recommend gobbling all the 2023-currrent online tutorial videos about SEO, email marketing and TikTok video production that you can.
Furthermore, keep other things in mind. The skillset of journalists—writing, editing, synthesizing complex information from a variety of sources into easily understandable output, interviewing, inferring based on evidence, synethsizing creative work into finished deliverables—applies to a wide, wide range of fields.
Step 5: Go for it!
Your life is going to be different. You’re not going to be in constant touch with the coworkers you’ve been in constant touch with for the last years or months. You most likely won’t get a job from the first resume you send out.
Job hunting sucks. It’s a long slog of filling out job applications on shitty online application systems that slowly eat away at your soul. It’s constantly tweaking LinkedIn profiles and trading job intel on private WhatsApp groups. It’s watching the money and perfecting your Zoom setup for the video interview.
But you, my friend, are awesome. You got this.