Is it worth it?

Congratulations.

 

Congrats! Now go read the "What makes this piece good?" thread.

 

I envy you, OG

 

Og, can I have your family's finance job? Thanks.

 

Congrats Og. Already doing well by getting that type of gig. It might be tough to get to a bigger paper, but if you put the time into your craft, you'll get noticed. Now take my comments with a grain of salt in that I have never worked at a large or medium sized daily paper.

 

Although my first job was pretty much what I expected, I gave notice a few days ago and have decided to start considering my options outside of journalism. I think the people who answered my question back during the summer turned out to be absolutely correct. Unless you love this profession, and I mean absolutely love it to the point where you really don't care about being constantly underpaid and undervalued, it just isn't worth investing the necessary time and effort.

With the economy on somewhat of an upswing (not that you'd know if you're in journalism), there's really not a better time for me to try my hand in finance. I gave this thing a shot, but ultimately I'm going to look back on it as something I did for fun in college and then moved on from it. It's sad, because I'm leaving some people behind at my soon-to-be-former job who didn't get out in time and are going to struggle financially for the rest of their lives. I have to make sure I don't wind up in that situation.

 

And that's the way it is, as Cronkite would say:
If we've lost the youngsters, we've lost America.

Good luck, Og. At least you gave it a shot.