Looked at one way, I'm an expert at transitions, having made it into and out of a dozen jobs in the past 20 years, 8 different houses, and roughly a half dozen serious relationships. So, from this perspective, change has long been the rule in my life, as opposed to the exception.
Yesterday's lunch was with a friend who has known me throughout this period of constant change, but who has lived a very different life, at least at work, from mine. For almost four decades, he checked in at the corner of Fifth & Mission Streets in downtown San Francisco, for the great bulk of years entering the Fifth Street door (to the old San Francisco Examiner), then, since the beginnings of the 21st century, through the Mission Street door to the headquarters of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Examiner was the flagship newspaper started by the legendary William Randolph Hearst, but over the years it ended up as an afternoon paper in a morning town. Finally, when the heirs agreed to sell the Chronicle to the Hearst Corp., my friend and the entire Examiner management team simply moved around the corner and took over the morning rag.
As part of the deal, the Hearst Corp. dumped the Examiner, which has since changed hands and is a free, tabloid style daily. Free of direct competition, you might have expected the Chronicle to flourish, but in the Internet Age, you would have been wrong.
Instead it has floundered, losing circulation and over $50 million a year.
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One day recently, after his long and illustrious career, my friend was called into a conference room by the HR person and handed his walking papers. In the way of this time and place, there was no ceremony, no word of thanks, nothing, just: "Go." Around a hundred veterans of the newspaper business were let go at the same time in that old building, which now echoes with the nuffled voices of their ghosts.
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