I'd worked for the 'Dallas Times Herald' for ten years, and its death was a kick in the gut the like of which I cannot recall ever having experienced.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I applied for a job at 'The New York Times' many years ago, and felt correctly that my life depended on it.
At that time I was making the largest salary known on television and I didn't want to see it die because those were the years paying off when I wasn't making anything.
When I was a general assignment reporter early in my career, I was the one knocking on their door after a tragedy.
The worst part of my life is newspapers are still alive - sorry, I had to say it.
I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim.
I worked in Licorice Pizza when John Lennon was killed. I had the day off, but I came in anyway because people needed a place to mourn.
One of my first jobs was as a recipe tester for a PR agency. One week, the editor of 'Housewife' magazine called my boss and asked me to write a column - the cookery editor had gone away on a press trip. I was terrified.
With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying.
I lost my job in the most public way possible, and the press had a field day with it all over the world. And guess what? I'm still here.
There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!