Life on Delay by John Hendrickson

Author:John Hendrickson [Hendrickson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

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MY SECOND DAY at my new job was Election Night 2012. Our downtown office was still closed because of Sandy, so we piled into the old Associated Press headquarters near Penn Station for a long night of…something. It wasn’t exactly clear what we were supposed to do. We were essentially a routing station for sharing content across the company’s seventy-five newspapers. All I remember from Election Night was the stack of pizza boxes from nearby NY Pizza Suprema, which became my favorite slice in the city.

Our real office was on the newly renovated twenty-fifth floor of 5 Hanover Square, near the southern tip of Manhattan. Each morning I’d get off the subway at Wall Street and walk past finance guys who looked much more put together than I did, though not necessarily happier. A big part of my job involved figuring out what entertainment articles—movie reviews, album reviews, award-show coverage—we could syndicate across the organization’s newspapers. This required a lot of conference calls with other editors around the country.

I dreaded these dial-ins more than anything. I never had the courage to disclose my problem at the beginning of the call—By the way, I stutter—I just tried and failed to hide it. I don’t recall my new boss ever asking me anything about why I talked this way and why I turned orangey red every time a new meeting would start. Sometimes one of the editors would ask if they should call back another time. I never knew what to say. So I’d just keep sweating and say nothing, then repeat the pattern again the next day.

I was in love with New York and didn’t regret my decision to move, but the job was soul crushing. We were essentially trying to eliminate redundancies at these already struggling papers where journalists worked long hours for small paychecks. The Denver Post, one of the bigger papers in the chain, had long relied on high-priced print ads from car dealerships and mattress stores, but in the 2010s these local businesses were becoming savvier with social media and moving that ad money to Facebook. The papers kept shrinking in size, page count, and staff. Meanwhile my team was trying to justify its existence. We were writing buzzwords like “innovation” and “streamline” and “centralize” on Post-it notes to hang on glass walls. Within six months I had already started applying elsewhere.

That first winter I spent a lot of time in the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library trying to come up with freelance story ideas. Each Wednesday I’d pitch the music editor at The Village Voice and get no response. I landed one story at Salon only to have it killed shortly before publication. I wrote a few small album reviews for Paste that paid twenty-five bucks apiece. Meanwhile, I kept sending out my résumé and hearing nothing. It didn’t matter that I was now a city dweller. I still felt shut out of the New York media bubble. The talent pool was so big, and everyone knew one another, or pretended like they did.

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