Skills You Never Knew You Had

by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

On the last day of March, WRTV changed hands at lunch and most of its newsroom was unemployed by dinner. More than 50 people. Of roughly 60 employees, fewer than five got an invitation to stay. In May, Indiana Public Media cut 18 positions and left six newsroom openings unfilled, and the statewide public broadcasting reporting team that fed stories to every station in Indiana was dissolved outright. This past Tuesday, Scripps sent pink slips to 268 people nationwide, partly to make room for automation.

I am not going to write another column about the death of local news. That beat is covered, and the people covering it are mostly right.

I want to talk to the people carrying a box out to the parking lot.

I have carried the box. In 2011, my radio station decided it could get along without me. It was not the first time — in 2003, when the Illinois attorney general’s office started letting people go, I was one of them. Both times I got the same well-meaning advice: everything happens for a reason. Nobody who has ever said that sentence was three weeks from a mortgage payment.

Here is what nobody tells you on the way out the door: the skills that made you good at that job were never the station’s property. They were yours. They walked out with you. They just have a translation problem.

Start with the deadline. You have shipped a product every single day, at a fixed length, on time, with incomplete information, while at least three things went wrong. Out in the wider world, there are entire departments that hold a two-hour retrospective to explain why the project slipped another quarter. You have never once been permitted to slip a quarter. A rundown is a project plan with a budget denominated in seconds. Say it that way on a résumé and watch what happens.

Then there’s the interview. You know how to get a stranger to tell you something they had no intention of saying, and to do it in eleven minutes because that’s all the time you had. In sales, that’s called discovery. In human resources, it’s called an investigation. In consulting, they bill it at $400 an hour and call it stakeholder engagement.

You can also write. More precisely, you can take something complicated — a bond issue, a consent decree, an actuarial report — and render it in plain English fast enough to be useful. That is the single most in-demand skill in any organization that has both a general counsel and a website. It is what communications shops, grant writers, policy departments, and internal comms teams are actually buying. Most of them are buying it from people who are worse at it than you.

If you covered a city council, a county commission or a school board, you can read a public budget. That means fund accounting, appropriations, bonds, TIF districts, and the difference between an operating fund and a capital one. Plenty of people can read a P&L. Very few can read a school corporation’s general fund and tell you where the money actually went, which is why superintendents and CFOs keep hiring the reporters who used to embarrass them.

If you ran a newsroom, you have managed people with no money, no leverage, terrible hours and considerable egos, and you got a product out anyway. That is management on hard mode. And if you have ever been live when the guest doesn’t show, the server dies and the producer is in your ear, understand that nothing in an ordinary workplace is as frightening as dead air. You have a nervous system that has already been calibrated for crisis. Crisis communications is a whole industry built on people who do not have one.

The other asset that goes with you is the phone. Years of returned calls, cultivated sources, and people who know your name is a book of business, and it depreciates. Two rules about it. First, use it early, while you are still “the woman from Channel 6” and not “someone who used to be at Channel 6.” A network is perishable inventory. Second, do not lead with the ask. Have coffee. Ask what they’re working on. The job comes out of the third conversation, not the first.

And do not go quiet. The most common mistake I have watched laid-off media people make is disappearing out of embarrassment, as if being downsized by a hedge fund in Cincinnati were a character flaw. Everyone already knows. Nobody thinks less of you. The only thing your silence accomplishes is that the people who would hire you forget to.

There is one more thing you have that you probably don’t count, which is that you know how the building works. You know which agency actually decides the thing, which deputy returns calls, how a bill really moves, and who in the room has the votes. Every trade association, hospital system, utility, law firm and university in this state pays real money for that literacy, and most of them are currently getting it from someone who learned it out of a binder.

Now the honest part, because I would rather tell you the truth than sell you a pep talk.

Some of this is going to sting. You are going to miss the byline. You will attend meetings that produce nothing, for people who have never had to be right by 6 p.m. A few of you will find out you were in love with the adrenaline rather than the journalism, and that discovery is worth having early. The pay may be better and the work will almost certainly be slower.

And some of you should not take a job at all. Some of you should start something. The barrier to entry is a domain name, a mailing list and an unreasonable amount of stubbornness. Ask me how I know.

The industry is contracting. Your skill set isn’t.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He was downsized out of a radio job in 2011 and started this website the same year.