"Why I left News"

she's too fucking old to enter that profession. WTF are you thinking?

 

Someone I work with who is about the same age as Ms. Bird gave her two weeks notice on Friday. She also is leaving for a P.R. job.

Unlike Bird, she (to my knowledge) has not posted sob story columns about leaving her job online, or whined about the demise of newspapers.

But my colleague's departure depressed me, and not only because I enjoy working with her.

She's one of the better reporters I've ever worked with, someone who digs for interesting stories on her beats, never complains when she has to drop previously scheduled appointments to cover breaking news, and used her time both in the office and covering assignments very efficiently. Her strength was covering environmental and/or county government news, but she also could crank out a great feature story or a funny column for our entertainment section.

In any other era, my colleague would have moved up the ladder to bigger and better papers than the Podunk Press. Instead, she stayed here four-plus years, in her second job out of college, and never received a raise. Hell, she took a 5 percent pay cut, like everyone else in our newsroom, at the beginning of 2009. It still hasn't been restored.

Allyson Bird's column is whiny as hell, but there are a truckload of good reasons to leave this business, and she highlighted a few of them.