If you could switch, what would you do?

Food critic...

 

Travel or personal electronics/gadgets. Or restaurant reviewer.

 

toss-up between entertainment critic (movies/tv/music), book reviewer, food critic, and technology critic.

 

I'd type in the obits.

 

Idaho's got the right idea. I'll just pick a different state.

 

Any entertainment job. Preferably the reality TV one. We seem to have people from our state on virtually every reality show. It would write itself!

 

I'd also love to be the Olympic sports beat writer for the local U.

 

Grab the cops beat. You'll see so much crazy stuff and meet so many weirdos that after five or 10 years, you're ready to become a novelist and open the vault.

These authors are all former news reporters: Carl Hiaasen, John Sandford, Michael Connelly, Edna Buchanan, plenty of others.

 

I think something like reviewing movies would be fun at first and then get really old after a while. I remember a friend of mine who reviewed films, the day she quit... She was forced to sit through Most Valuable Primate II, and she was like, I can't do this anymore.

Funnily enough, I know the guy who wrote that piece of shit, and he's such a nice guy, I'm sure he would feel bad if he knew that he helped drive people insane.

Anyway, to answer the question: Travel writer. Get paid to see crazy places and do crazy shit you would never be able to do on your own.

I'd like to do the baseball beat for a summer or two again, too.

 

Do we have to stay in our current shop (which is what I thought the question was), or can we take any job we want, anywhere?

At my current place, I don't think I would switch with anyone. But if I can go somewhere else, I want to be the "good cop" columnist in a big-league town (a la Joe Posnanski). Within view of mountains and/or beaches would be swell, but I'm not too picky.

 

One of my best friends did that for about two years. He's now out of the business, and that's one of the things he doesn't miss.

As for me, I'd review concerts or albums; even movies would work for me. I never thought of food critic, but what a job that would be.

 

I'd would love to be a TV/Movie/Video Game critic, a travel writer, or a correspondent for a magazine. Said magazine would be one that is not serious in any sense of the imagination.