Back to Earth   

What has become of the journalists who left traditional news organizations for the once high-flying dotcoms and the magazines that covered them?

Ron Recinto had been toiling at daily newspapers for more than 10 years when an old friend called him up to lure him away from the world of crackling police scanners, city budgets and agate type.

It was September 2000, the tail end of the Internet boom, and Recinto, now 36, was an editor at the State in Columbia, South Carolina. He loved his job, he cherished newspapers and he had no plans to leave the business. But his friend, an editor at the technology magazine Red Herring, talked persuasively, and Recinto listened. The editor rushed him copies of the magazine. They were thick with ads, glossy and hip.

When Recinto agreed to an interview, they booked a flight for him to San Francisco immediately, spending $2,000 on a ticket.

"I was used to the newspaper [hiring] style," says Recinto, meaning a city editor gets back to you weeks if not months after you apply, you schedule a two-day interview for a month later, then the editor leaves you hanging another month after the interview.

At the magazine headquarters, he again expected "newspaper style," prearranged meetings with various editors and reporters...an itinerary. But the offices were manic and the interviews free-form. It was clear that an offer was coming.

It did, despite Recinto's lack of experience writing about technology.

The rest of his story tracks the arc of the New Economy saga: The magazine's first layoffs came a month after he started. Nine months later, while sitting in an auto dealership as his new SUV was being worked on, an editor called Recinto to tell him that he, too, no longer had a job.

Recinto and so many others. Hundreds if not thousands of reporters were beguiled away from jobs in the mainstream press, trading traditional beats like schools, cops and courts to work at startup print and online magazines, covering beats like "business-to-business e-commerce" and "data storage." The magazines and the beats were babies of the boom, and many of them were casualties of the bust.

In recent months, as the magazines announced countless rounds of layoffs or shut down altogether, and as newspaper jobs dried up with the shrink in advertising, I have wondered what happened to the many seasoned journalists who lost their jobs. I have been curious, too, about how they judged their decisions to leave relatively comfortable jobs on city desks for seat-of-the-pants publications focused not on communities, but on an industry.

Were they eager to leap back into newsrooms? Or were they proud of the work they did covering technology beats? Did they defend their New Economy dabblings? My interest was fueled by my own circumstance: I knew nothing about technology when I left the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in May 1999 for a magazine in the Washington, D.C., area with the appalling name of Federal Computer Week. I knew next to nothing when an editor from Interactive Week e-mailed me at work five months later and asked me to become the magazine's Washington bureau chief.

Thrilled with the title, I took the job.

I worked alone from an office in downtown D.C., and then from the attic of my Baltimore house. During the height of the boom, CNN, MSNBC and other television stations regularly requested that I appear on various programs to talk about technology. I turned down most of them because I remained grossly untutored about technology and because I'm shy. I finally appeared on "ABC World News This Morning." It was disastrous.

My magazine lasted until November. As the layoff tally ballooned through the year, I contemplated the many unemployed journalists. Are they finding work? Are they riddled with regrets?

When Interactive Week died, I was one of them.

When Red Herring made Recinto an offer, it took him weeks to decide whether to stay put, take that job or take another at the Contra Costa Times in California's Bay Area. He interviewed at the newspaper, a Knight Ridder paper like the State, when he flew out for the Red Herring interview.

Recinto was comfortable with and competent at daily journalism. The work at Red Herring would be different, and the future of the magazine certainly was hazier than that of the State, which might endure hard times but was unlikely to just shut down.

But he took the Red Herring offer for "that challenge, to do something different, and it was the hottest thing around," he says. "I got an e-mail from one of my buddies at the Wall Street Journal, and he told me it was the best journalism jump ever, from South Carolina to Red Herring."

Soon, he was swept up in the tech frenzy.

"All of a sudden I was a hip journalist," he says. "I'd been working in the daily grind, in the obscurity of smaller and midsize papers, and suddenly my stories are in big national publications, in airport bookstores. It was like, 'Wow! I'm cool!' "

He remembers a chief executive officer calling him from an outdoor café in Paris from her cell phone, talking for an hour. He traveled to Miami for a story--the travel budget at the magazine appeared to be bottomless--and the public relations people at the company he visited told him they would "clear the decks" for him for as long as he was in town.

"Enough of those reinforcements make it easy to forget the newspaper business," he says. "Everybody wants to talk to you, to get into your magazine."

Nagging him though was the style of the journalism, which he describes as "edgy" and "with a little bit of opinion." Looking back, Recinto says he "was always learning the ropes" at Red Herring. "I never got fully into sync, where I was comfortable."

And the magazine's audience of venture capitalists, CEOs and bankers made him long for the readers he calls "Ma and Pa Kettle."

After the layoff, he barely looked at other tech publications for work. His goal was to get back into newspapers. "I could almost walk into any newsroom and be comfortable I could be a reporter there," he says. "I needed that assurance, to get back to something I was comfortable doing."

After months of networking, he landed a job as an editor at the Detroit Free Press. Now, he considers his tech stint a learning experience.

"I got to ride the wave," he says. "I was walking around with my Red Herring bag and saying I was a staff writer for Red Herring and doing good journalism."

Recinto and scores of journalists have been dumped this past year into one of the worst journalism job markets in history. There is no data on exactly how many reporters have lost jobs, but a quick tour of www.iwantmedia.com/ layoffs.html, a Web site chronicling the carnage, tells the story, layoff by layoff: • CNET Networks, February 6, 2001, 190 jobs. • Red Herring Communications, May 17, 54 jobs. • Business 2.0, June 8, 140 jobs. • CNET Networks again, July 24, 300 jobs. • Industry Standard, August 16, 180 jobs. • Upside Media, September 28, 100 jobs. • Interactive Week, November 5, 75 jobs. • Internet Week shut down its operation in January.

The list, of course, is much longer and still growing.

Meanwhile, at newspapers, the same advertising market that spawned magazines and the ensuing hiring spree had fattened papers' bottom lines. Traditional print prospered as technology companies bought blizzards of ads and companies desperate for workers transformed classified sections into small telephone books. Then the bubble burst and the ads evaporated.

John Morton, a newspaper analyst and columnist for AJR, calls this "the greatest newspaper recession since the Great Depression." Before this, the 1991 recession was the worst time for the media since World War II.

"Traditionally, until the last decade or so, newspaper employment has not been greatly affected by the ups and downs of the economy," he says. "Layoffs were unheard of until 1991."

Morton deems it "unlikely" that once the recession is over, newspapers will thicken their ranks again. Media companies, he says, seem satisfied with their current, pared-down staffs.

Magazines, however, are often yoked to economic highs and lows, says David Abrahamson, an associate professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

"When times are good a lot of publications are founded whose economic rationale is not terribly rigorous," says Abrahamson, who specializes in magazine journalism.

The magazine boom of the late 1990s and early 2000 happened, he says, because "there was a big bucket of ad dollars there, and you needed to find the right kind of ladle to get to them."

The proliferation of editorial ladles is not unique to the Internet. For example, Abrahamson says that the ferment surrounding personal computing in the early 1980s husbanded an array of new magazines that have since folded. And as The New Yorker reported in January, 14 new weekly trade papers and two dailies appeared in Britain during a railway boom in the 1840s. They had names like Railway World, the Railway Express and the Railway Standard. Few lasted.

Some newspaper executives have recently been bombarded with résumés from mainstream journalists who left newspapers for technology magazines. In many cases, the journalists are top-notch. Unfortunately, the jobs aren't there.

When Chris Lopez, metro editor for the Contra Costa Times, advertised a position late in 2001, he received about 70 résumés. The "overwhelming majority" of them were from reporters who were at dotcoms or technology magazines and wanted out, or reporters who were laid off in the New Economy collapse. "There's a lot of people who got out of newspaper work and are trying to get back in but are finding a very tight newspaper job market," he says. "That's hard for them, I'm sure."

During the boom, hiring and keeping reporters was difficult, says Dave Tepps, deputy managing editor at the San Jose Mercury News, who describes the era as a "wild period." Now, he says, when a job opens editors take their time choosing between good candidates, a shift from the boom mentality of "if somebody is good, yeah, OK, we'll take them."

After Jason Thompson, 30, graduated from Oxford University, where he studied English literature and served as editor of a student newspaper, he got work as a TV journalist, producing documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corp. He also wrote for national newspapers as a freelancer.

Eventually he fell in love with a woman from San Francisco and followed her to California. He found work fast with an Internet video company but wanted to do more writing. So after six months he took a job as a reporter with a new magazine called Streaming Media.

Technology, Thompson says, "wasn't a field I felt I was naturally at home at, but there it was."

He found Silicon Valley mesmerizing and alien, full of hype and hot air, a bizarre cocktail of "money and entrepreneurial energy." He started at the magazine when it launched in January 2001. In September it folded.

Jobs were scarce, but Thompson eventually found work as a toy demonstrator for FAO Schwarz. After the holidays, he was hoping to get a job at the store playing the puppet-carver Geppetto from the story Pinocchio. But instead he decided to freelance and try his hand at a novel.

When first unemployed, he says, he wallowed in "silly narcissism," asking himself, "Why me? I've got all of this pedigree. Why am I not a reporter at the New York Times? What happened?" But working as a toy demonstrator humbled him. He says he was "maybe slightly arrogant" before being laid off.

"Now I feel like I've got to work a lot harder, and I can't take anything for granted."

He says he has no regrets.

"I remember doing investigative research for the BBC's flagship investigative program, 'Panorama,' " he says. "It was like if you called from 'Frontline,' people have a tendency to bow down and they have the expectation of you as the hard-nosed journalist, and in some ways you have it easy. If you are calling from a relatively obscure trade publication, they have the power, and doing a good journalistic job when you're not calling the shots is a good test of journalistic skills."

Kurt Greenbaum, 39, and Charles Lunan, 42, both left the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida to take management jobs at LocalBusiness. com, a news Web site dedicated largely to the technology industry. Greenbaum had logged 13 years at the Sun-Sentinel; Lunan nearly 10. Both had spent their entire careers with newspapers.

The idea behind LocalBusiness.com was to cover local business in cities around the country and focus on smaller companies and deals than those covered by larger daily papers.

When Greenbaum started in February 1999, he was the third full-time editorial employee, and the Web site covered four cities. At its height, the site served 28 cities with 80 journalists on staff. It closed down in April 2001.

Greenbaum, now mid-Atlantic general manager for Media General's Interactive Media Division in Richmond, Virginia, says of his experience: "It was the best job I ever had, frankly."

"The reason I left the Sun-Sentinel was to have the chance to build something new, and I did. I got to do that and I got to learn a lot along the way," he says. "I'm better off now than I was before because I got to roll up my sleeves and make a real contribution to building a business."

Like Greenbaum, Lunan, who spent much of his career writing about business, says he left the Sun-Sentinel to wade directly into the realm of spreadsheets, marketing plans and sales strategiethe nuts and bolts of business.

"I felt if I was ever going to make the entrepreneurial plunge, now is the time," says Lunan, now the economics writer for the Charlotte Observer. "So what, the thing lasts a year or two and it folds. I have enough confidence in my skills that I'll make it marketable."

Lunan also says that "in business, you get tired of writing about everybody else going out and making their millions. There was a bit of avarice involved. I wanted to go out and make some money."

At the startup, Lunan served as managing editor, just under Editor in Chief Greenbaum. He never mucked around in the financial guts of the operation as he envisioned. Instead, he directed the news coverage around the country.

After the business folded, Lunan, leery of jumping back into newspapers, did freelance communications work for a while. He says he wanted to see if he could make a living writing for corporate clients. But he traveled to Charlotte to interview for the job he now holds and says he expressed so many misgivings about the newspaper industry that he almost didn't get an offer.

Now, he's glad he's back in the newspapering saddle. He's happy to be writing again--he left the Sun-Sentinel as an assistant city editor-- and plans to stay put for a while.

"What newspapers do is so unique," Lunan says. "One of the fallouts of the collapse of the dotcoms is people aren't taking things for granted so much, and they are turning to newspapers for information.... Newspapers are still standing, and the dotcoms are all in ashes."

When I started working at Interactive Week in October 1999, the magazine had about a dozen reporters and editors trying to cover and package absolute madness. The publication seemed to grow by a quarter every month. E-mails from public relations people flooded our e-mail boxes all day, all night. The pace was decidedly more frantic than that of dailies, where I had spent the previous six years--at the Sun-Sentinel, writing about local politics and at the Albuquerque Tribune, covering crime, courts, higher education and health care.

Some Interactive Week staffers had come from dailies, others from the technology press. Soon after I started, the magazine's founding editor left to take over Ziff Davis Media Inc.'s Web operations, and Rob Fixmer, who had been technology editor at the New York Times, was anointed editor in chief.

Fixmer, a dauntingly energetic guy with a raspy smoker's voice and an easy laugh, went on a much-needed hiring spree. He lured former colleagues from the New York Times and eventually attracted what seemed to be the entire business staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News--including a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist.

Reporters were paid between $80,000 and $90,000 a year; editors made more. Employees also got stock options.

Fixmer's last hire was Robert Bryce, an Austin Chronicle staffer who had covered Texas politics since the 1980s and was a prolific freelancer, writing for Talk magazine, the New York Times, Salon.com, U.S. News & World Report and other publications. Bryce, 41, met Interactive Week Executive Editor Jeri Clausing, a former New York Times reporter recruited by Fixmer, at a party in Texas, and Clausing encouraged Bryce to freelance for the magazine.

Bryce had never written about technology, but after a few months he pitched a few stories to Clausing, one of which became a cover story. The magazine offered him a job with a substantially higher salary than he was making at the Chronicle.

"Fed up with politics" and with writing about George W. Bush, he took the job. "It wasn't all about the money," he says. "A lot of it was a desire to do something different and to learn something about an industry I knew nothing about."

He wrote a lot about energy--the energy crisis in California and its effect on Silicon Valley was a big story at the time. Shortly after the magazine died, Bryce scored a deal with a publisher to write a book about Enron, a company he had written about for Interactive Week. Public Affairs publishing gave Bryce a fat advance and roughly six months to portray the Enron debacle.

"Even knowing I would get fired after nine months, I'd probably still do it all over again," says Bryce, who lives in Austin and supports a family. "It was a great opportunity for me. The people were first-class, and the magazine was first-class. There was no, and is no, downside to doing it. I'm not bitter in the slightest."

Clausing, too, stands by her decision to shelve 20 years of daily newspapering at United Press International, the Associated Press, the Dallas Times Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the New York Times for an editing gig at Interactive Week. At the Times, she started out as a freelancer for NYTimes.com, then joined the Web site staff while also writing for the newspaper.

"A lot of people were like, 'You left the New York Times?' " says Clausing, 40. "For me it was about a new challenge. I got to help run a 300,000 circulation magazine, with one of the best staffs I've ever worked with, including the New York Times."

The magazine's shuttering amounted to her fourth layoff in journalism--UPI laid her off twice, and the Dallas Times Herald folded while she was there. "My instinct was, I'm done with this business," she said in January while still deciding what to do with her career.

Rebecca Cantwell had done just about everything during two decades with three Colorado dailies. At the Rocky Mountain News, where she spent 13 years, she covered a variety of beats, then worked for two years as night city editor and three as urban affairs editor before trying business reporting. She mostly wrote about the telecommunications frenzy blossoming in Denver, as well as technology in general and aerospace.

As she grew more savvy about the subject matter, she tired of having to assume no knowledge on the part of her readers, padding every 12-inch story with precious inches of background. When Interactive Week approached her with a job, she jumped.

"I liked the idea of writing for a more informed audience, and being able to write more sophisticated stories," she says.

Cantwell, a hypercompetent and dedicated worker, vaulted up the editing ranks to become one of the magazine's top editors. She also persuaded four Rocky Mountain News reporters to chuck their jobs and join Interactive Week.

The shuttering of the magazine haunts her. As of mid-January, only one of the four she dragged to Interactive Week had a job – back at the Rocky Mountain News.

"I persuaded people with long and distinguished careers in daily journalism to join this venture with every expectation it would be a fruitful career path," she says. "The fact that the magazine was owned by a bunch of investment bankers whose only interest seems to be in short-term profits makes me very skittish about ever working for such an organization again."

Newspapers, she says, "at least have in general a stronger sense of responsibility to their community and their readership, and to consider factors other than short-term profits."

Still, Cantwell does not regret taking the New Economy plunge herself.

"I felt like I was in the middle of covering a very important story," she says. "But I'm bitter about how it ended. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next."

I'd been working up in my Baltimore attic since September 2000. When the magazine died, I kept writing out of the irregularly shaped room--my newsroom. I'm now a freelancer.

Not much has changed. I still work alone, stare at the same manila walls and navigate the same sprawl of family photos and personal gewgaws (a snow globe, rocks picked up in Ireland, a woven basket containing paper clips).

Interactive Week introduced me to Washington politics and policymaking--and to technology. If I'd stuck with newspapering, I doubt I'd ever have had that chance. I wrote long, complicated features that wouldn't have run in daily newspapers because the audience wouldn't have been deemed sophisticated enough. I penned a column.

I worked with the finest crew of reporters and editors in my career. Absent were office politics and jostling egos. The work was around-the-clock, but for the most part it was from within the confines of my house. I lunched with my preschool daughter every day; I heard her laugh downstairs while I wrote.

The times were heady and historymaking. I leapt into the middle of it and it was exciting.

It was the best job I ever had.

Like all of the reporters and editors I interviewed who left the mainstream media to write about the New Economy when the New Economy was full of promise, I have no regrets.