THOSE ROUGH WATERS

Dear Spike:

I always said I'd go down with the ship. But the ship is sailing on. And, it would appear, it is doing so without me.

After a decade of chasing scoops and beating deadlines, I'm leaving my job as a newspaper reporter.

The reasons are myriad, but not all that complicated. I love what I do and would be very pleased to know that I could do it for the rest of my life. But the future of the newspaper industry is murky, at best. More than 30,000 newspaper employees in this country have lost their jobs in the past three years. Hundreds of papers have stopped the presses.

I was perfectly aware that this could happen when I got into this business. I'll never forget the day that my father came home, arms wrapped around a cardboard box, after the newspaper at which he worked closed its doors in 1993. I'll never forget the look on his face.

So yes, I knew the waters would be rough.

But damn the torpedoes, I said. Full steam ahead, I said.

That was before you came. I've always been willing to go down with the ship, but I'm not willing to bring you down, too.

And thankfully, I knew something:

The year after his paper closed, your grandfather helped bring the World Cup of soccer to the United States. Two years later, he helped found Major League Soccer (we benefited from his hard work just the other night when we watched Real Salt Lake defeat the Columbus Crew 4-1.) When he'd seen enough of the ugly side of the beautiful game, your papa bounced back into the newspaper industry for a few years before finally landing in the New Haven Unified School District, where he helps keep students, parents, teachers and administrators connected to their schools and to one another.

At every step along the way, he found purpose and satisfaction and joy.

And so I knew that I could too — no matter the ship on which I sailed.

Since shortly after you were born, I've been working toward making a transition from journalism to teaching. And today all that work came to fruition. I have accepted an offer to become an assistant professor at Utah State University.

The job comes with a lot of great benefits — not the least of which is the time and freedom to continue to commit acts of journalism. Yes, I'll be keeping my toe in those rough waters.

But the new job also comes with some sacrifices.

For the past three years, I have been blessed with the ability to work at home, with you by my side. It wasn't always easy to juggle my duties as a father with my duties as a journalist, but you helped me make it work. I would not trade the time we spent together for anything in the world.

Next year, you'll go off to school — and I'll be commuting to a job that is 90 miles away from our home. The department chair has pledged to help me arrange my schedule in such a way that is conducive to being both a good teacher and a good father and husband. I'm so grateful for his support, but it's still safe to say that there will be days that you and I won't see much of each other, if we see each other at all. That's going to be hard for me.

The trade-offs are weekends without the prospect of breaking news. School holidays. Summertime.

And, yes, a little bit of security.

That's not to say that these waters couldn't get rough, too. They very well might. But, at least for now, we sail on smoother seas.

Love,
dad