One of my friends, a journalist, is newly homeless.
He’s writing publicly about it in a moving and beautiful way on a blog called The Homeless Editor. And my heart is breaking for him.
I first met Rich Jackson more than three decades ago. We were journalism students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and proud as hell of our work at the Spectator, the student newspaper.
Rich and I were close back then. We drank countless cheap beers together while talking (mostly) about politics and journalism. I saved the columns he wrote as the Spectator’s editorial editor. They were great columns — funny, shamelessly full of puns, smart, and self-deprecating. I felt that Rich was destined for greatness in journalism and that it would be cool to pull yellowed clippings of his columns out of a folder someday. “I knew Rich back when …”
We were deeply serious about journalism, even as college students. We often stayed in the newspaper office late at night, drinking coffee to fuel our work. We loved every minute of it. We were both local Wisconsin boys. Neither of us came from money. We scraped to pay in-state tuition, hopefully with a few bucks left over for the happy hour drink specials at the bars on Water Street.
After graduation we remained close friends for a few years but then drifted apart.
I spent eight years in local journalism before making the leap to national publications. My career was helped greatly by a few important breaks, including a lucky meeting with an intern recruiter for the Los Angeles Times who happened to share my love for the Green Bay Packers. Later, in another stroke of luck, I landed a job in the nation’s capital, something I’d always wanted as a journalist.
Meanwhile, Rich was having a tougher time in the heartland, where the local journalism model that had flourished for more than a century was collapsing. He rose to top-level editorial positions, and yet he was chased from job to job as newsrooms shriveled.
I’ve always had great respect for the work Rich and others were doing at local newspapers. When I was working as a reporter and editor covering Congress, many of my colleagues would have benefited greatly from a few years in the trenches of local journalism.
God bless the Rich Jacksons of the world who understand how important their work is to the people whose lives it touches, no matter the circulation numbers. Whether he was working at a newspaper in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Indiana, he was always happy whenever he was employed as a journalist. “I love my damn job,” he often wrote in his Facebook posts.
To this day, you won’t find a hint of self-pity in Rich’s writings, even though he almost certainly has been woefully underpaid throughout his career, especially considering the value of his work to local communities.
It hit me hard when I saw Rich’s Facebook post announcing that he was blogging about what it’s like to go overnight from being an executive editor at a newspaper to being homeless. I find it easy to believe that his life’s work in local journalism has left him with minuscule savings. So little reward for such important work.
I gave him a call on Sunday to see how he was doing. He was surprisingly upbeat. He’s always bounced back and believes firmly that he will again this time. He said he was let go three times previously; once for economic reasons, and twice because publishers didn’t like his aggressive investigative reporting. I have no way of knowing whether that’s true, and I cannot vouch for Rich’s journalism skills these days — it’s been too long since we worked together.
But I do know this: if Rich Jackson was fired for being a hard-charging journalist who refused to back off on tough reporting just because advertisers were threatening to pull out, that sounds exactly like the guy I knew 30 years ago.
So if anyone out there needs an editor who knows how to fearlessly run a local newsroom, give Rich Jackson a call and see what he has to say. Your next editor just might be living in a Motel 6 in Indiana.
Dan Parks is a senior editor at The Chronicle of Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. He previously was a reporter and editor at Bloomberg, Congressional Quarterly and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and is an alumnus of the Poynter Leadership Academy (2008).
