Friday, May 10, 2024

Careers.8

 (This is the eighth and final part in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four and Part Five and Part Six and Part Seven.)

Why, one might ask, would I go into so much detail about my half-century+ in journalism? As they often say on TV, that’s a good question.

My reason is simple. By sheer coincidence, my experiences in journalism paralleled almost perfectly the rise and fall of journalism as a profession during the lat 20th and early 21st centuries.

Thus I have tried to produce a narrative of those changes that can serve as a personal version of the historical record.

During my last dozen years before retiring, I briefly held jobs at startups Predictify and GreatNonProfits, consulted for clients including Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia, a wonderful French company called Smub, and worked as a media analyst/blogger for BNET and 7X7.

In the last two positions, I met and interviewed some of the founders of Twitter, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Nextdoor, Getaround and dozens of other companies as the age of social media came into being.

Occasionally, I put my investigator hat back on; for example, I wrote a report that of the 44 board members of the largest social media companies early on, none were women. This despite the fact that over half of their customers were women.

As I reached the age of 65, further employment opportunities seemed to be limited, so I decided to retire. This was early in 2013.

Retirement didn’t suit me and within months I had rejoined KQED as a part-time blogger. The public media company had a large radio and TV footprint, but only a minor web presence.

Then I applied for and got a job as senior editor, digital news at KQED, and assembled a team of writers and producers that built a large digital audience to complement the legacy broadcast services.

We also started an ad hoc investigative team at KQED that produced award-winning reports on police violence, sexual abuse, and official corruption.

Finally, in late 2019, health issues forced me to retire for good, 53 years after I had started at the age of 18.

HEADLINES:

No comments: