[Via Weisblott, & billdoskoch.ca]

Thirty years ago today, I started my first paying job as a journalist with the The Record, a weekly newspaper in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. I was 26 years old.

That nostalgic fact leads to today’s announcement — I am now going to describe myself as an ex-journalist.

To a certain extent, that’s moot — I likely became an ex-journalist when I left the employ of Bell Media, where I was a digital journalist for the CTV Toronto website — on June 1, 2013. I was downsized while still on long-term disability for severe depression. I was 54 years old when that happened.

Since then, I’ve been unable to find a staff gig in journalism. At this point, it seems clear I never will get hired for a staff job again. Too old, out of the game too long. The common wisdom is that being out of work six months might doom you when it comes to getting another job, regardless of the field. That seems to be true.

Last year, I wrote about my job-hunting difficulties in a post called Two years of job searching, unfulfilled.

By then, I’d had one real interview and two informational ones. After that, I had two more real interviews in the summer of 2015. I’ve had no others since. Three real interviews in three years.

The last two were instructive. One was for an online copy editing position, the other for an online writing job. The copy editing job went to someone who had more previous experience with the organization than I did (“It was very close,” the managing editor said).

In the writing interview, I started developing a feeling of doom shortly after it started and never really recovered. At one point in the telephone interview, one of the three people conducting it had obviously been reading my resume. She blurted out, “He’s been out of work two years.” Her colleague echoed, “Two years …” And in my head, I told myself, “‘You’re screwed.'”

The jobs eventually went to the two casuals doing the work. The HR person who telephoned me with the news said I had interviewed strongly — something I thought strange, because I considered it a fairly flat interview performance on my part.

Those interviews were with CBC. What I found interesting was that in the aftermath, this taxpayer-subsidized operation started calling for “recent experience” in job ads, without defining exactly what that meant. I just know I never got another CBC interview.

In any event, two of the three jobs I seemed to have a legitimate shot at went to inside candidates who were already employed. In the third case, I don’t know whether the successful copy editing candidate was currently employed at the time he interviewed or not.

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