Thirty seven days in the unemployment line

It looks as though I'm going to have to change the name of this blog. I was originally inspired by the government extension of unemployment aid allowing laid off Americans to collect for up to 99 weeks.

My position at the Missoulian newspaper was cut on Monday, September 30. I applied for unemployment immediately, and to date I've received nothing but slips of paper saying my unemployment aid status is pending.

Last night I accepted a job at the new director of digital content at KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. Somehow Ninetynineweeks just doesn't seem that appropriate any more. However, I don't want to leave any interested readers hanging, so I'll continue to chronicle the adventure as it progresses.

My wife and I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the early part of our marriage. Having to move away after we had our first child, we vowed to find a way back some day. Since then, we returned to Oregon, spent time traveling and working in Eastern Europe and ended up in Missoula, Montana, which is not exactly a population center. And now Alaska, with an even lower population than Montana, is our our next destination. Things don't always make sense, but I find that big picture stuff is often a little fuzzy and distal. Probably for a good reason.

I have always loved the ocean, but I have come to love the mountains. Anchorage seems to have both in abundance, which is something very satisfying to me.

Several months ago I was chatting with a friend in Alaska about our various moves since we met several years ago when I was researching a story for a University of Oregon publication. We would eventually end up working together at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and we founded the craft beer blog - "Will blog for beer."


On this evening, I was asking about life in Alaska, a place she moved after her husband graduated from law school in Oregon. To my surprise, one of the best print writers I'd ever worked with was now working at a broadcast station.


She took a few minutes to explain that the company was expanding beyond the traditional 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast news to a more web-centric model to provide news digitally in the way Alaskans are increasingly digesting their news.


She told me they were going to begin a search for a digital content director and asked if I was interested in having her forward my resume on to the station president.


I floated the idea past my wife the next day, and I got the reaction I thought I would get. She sort of frowned and cocked her head sideways with that look that says, "You're crazy, and I hope I didn't hear you right."


I let it go and didn't think much more about it until that fateful Monday.


After sort of processing the idea of being laid off and immediately formatting several plans, including grad school, self employment, international job possibilities and cobbling a bunch of local job offers together, I came back to the Alaska job and decided to E-mail my friend to find out if that search was on.


It was, and while figuring out how to navigate the unemployment aid system, I was corresponding with my future boss in Anchorage.


Finally we were invited to travel to Anchorage to meet with the team there and to check things out around town. I've usually done this part of the job interview process myself, but this time Cheryl came with me, as I knew she'd be the hardest sell.

Sunset from downtown Anchorage

Turns out we both loved Anchorage. The sun was just setting as we flew into the city over the tortured ice-bound world of southwest Alaska. I could see a monolithic shadow to the north, something so immense I had to scrunch down in my seat to see the entire mass. This was Denali. The snowless Chugach range framed in the twinkling lights of Anchorage as we landed.


Ocean and mountains. It's like a complete world for me, though neither of us have any illusions about how difficult winters can be up there. We're pretty big fans of the light.


A move to Anchorage is not taken lightly. Not by the prospective employer and not by those seeking a job in that state. So the drawn-out process has been a bit torturous as our funds have shrunk to uncomfortable levels.


To accept the offer last night was rewarding for many reasons, not just the physical need to know that our future is set. It's rewarding to know I'll be able to continue in the job that my journalism career has morphed into. Going from a traditional print reporter to mobile journalist and videographer to online reporter and finally a digital manager is something I didn't expect when I walked across the graduation platform at the University of Oregon, but it's twice the career I planned for and therefore twice as rewarding.


It's nice to know I won't have to wait around for unemployment checks that never come. And searching for jobs is a torturous activity in this day in age. I will not miss it.


Now begins the daunting task of getting ourselves to Alaska. You can drive, but it takes up to five or six days. Shipping items is expensive, as is flying. This blog will likely continue to explore the whimsical nature of family antics, the challenges of moving to America's last frontier and the interesting details of settling in a place that might as well be a million miles away from family for the ease of getting their and back.





Tim

Broken promises are endemic in this society

We've passed the four-week mark and no unemployment check yet. No sign of that soon. I've heard testimony from others who've been unemployed for a while that they are at the six-month mark with no relief.

We bought our house one year ago, and we bought it on the promise that the government would give us $8,000 as a tax incentive. We have not seen that money either. A tax attorney friend told me that he'd heard, unofficially and off the record, from an IRS agent that the government is out of money and drawing out payments in order to finish paying off the incentive, which ended earlier this year.

I'm not old enough to have been around when men sealed things with a handshake, but I certainly understand the sentiment old timers feel for that. It's much too easy to break a promise today. It seems to be done all the time in fact.

I can only assume my former employer paid out the taxes on me that are then collected by the federal government to be used to ease the burden in times of unemployment. If they did, it's difficult to see why so much red tape exists when the program was designed to help people. Of course you have to account for fraud, but the government seems almost unable to actually stick to its word.

It's no wonder then that young people are simply walking away from their home loans and leaving their houses to rot while banks desperately seek new buyers. When the government doesn't keep its promise, why should we? Right?

There was a time when a promise was not lightly made. Today they're as easily made as liar loans and other predatory techniques centered around the gain of money. Even at a personal level, promises are easy to make to perhaps assuage guilt or make someone feel better, but breaking the promise seems even easier than making it in the first place.

I've seen more friends posting apologies for not following through on things, and I can't help if as a culture we're not entering some sort of moral third dimension where promises are told and retold as a tale without end. With no resolution of having followed through.

Of course I promised to love and cherish my wife until death parts us. These same words are uttered by people every day, and yet every day people dissolve their marriages as if paper somehow renders that promise null and void.

Why do we promise the moon, when we can't deliver this little blue and green ball of rock we've already marked with our scent? Is it wrong to expect something from the government? In the Soviet era, the populace of a country like Russia did not trust its government as far as it could throw it.

But in one of the greatest booms of prosperity ever seen, it's decidedly impossible to trust our own government to follow through  on its basic promises, which seems to make it impossible for us to follow through on those things we promised to fulfill, like making the mortgage payment.

As a father, I struggle to follow through on every promise I make the kids, and yet I fling promises about as easily as the U.S. government prints new money.

Perhaps we should return to the handshake, though I think people have been living on broken promises so long that there is very little meaning left in the action and its implication.

In the Old Testament story of Abraham, a promise was made that only an omnipresent, omniscient deity could fulfill. A physical sign of an offering, a carcass split in two was laid out and the participants in the promise walked between the halves. The implication in those days being that a broken promise meant death. Then a hand is placed on the thigh of person who is making an oath, further insuring that the events detailed will come to pass. I'm pretty sure this is not something that would go over today.

But my point is that words are seemingly easily broken today, whereas complex rituals were often added to a promise in years past. As much as we've lost our ability to keep our promises today, we've lost our ability to believe in promises made. I'm not sure this makes us better off than our ancestors.

I would like not to be cynical about my view of when the government might fulfill its promise to me regarding the insured money I should be receiving, but I have no sign of faithfulness from that inhuman entity. I would like not to be cynical about my friends and family who make and break promises, but I've learned not to trust, which comes easier than belief.

Tim

Walking the wrong way on an escalator and "Red Dawn" dreams

I received my severance package today, though I don't necessarily think that package is the right word for enough cash to get you through one month.

But I paid this month's mortgage and put another mortgage payment in savings, which left us with enough to keep the lights and heat on for the same amount of time. Here's hoping for a warm fall.

I'll get into the nightmare of navigating the unemployment aid system in another post. I'm still reflecting on its vagaries and endless bureaucratic labyrinths.

There is something very terrifying about that remaining number on your bank ledger. Knowing that it's fairly final, and you won't see it that high again for an undetermined amount of time. But it also plays into the adventure side of things. I've often wondered about our resiliency in tough times.

Everyone talks about putting away six months of living expenses so you can get through those troughs in life. But every time you reach a big milepost, it seems to cost you your six month savings. Buy a new car or make a down payment on a house. Pay a large hospital bill or a surgery for a beloved pet, and poof, there it goes.

Out of everyone I know, I'd be willing to bet maybe one or two actually have the luxury of sitting on six months worth of living expenses. We certainly don't.

I have "Red Dawn" dreams. Those end-of-the-world apocalyptic, the-Commies-are-coming sort of dreams where city slickers have to re adapt to the wilds and living off the land. Last year my wife and I did a caveman diet, where we tried to eat mostly meats, nuts and raw fruits and veggies. It's almost impossible to do this anymore.

A layoff doesn't necessarily mean we'll be eking out a living on mushrooms and goat milk with dirty faced children running around our mountain outpost, but seeing the remains of your working life summed up in a few numbers next to a dollar sign makes you think about what's over that precipice that we're trying to stay away from like kids walking the wrong way on an escalator.

Tim

Unemployment by the numbers, or my beef with business reporting

Numbers don't mean a lot when you're not particularly affected by them. One key to great journalism is to be able to connect people to numbers by making it about their audience. Investors read business reports, because the numbers speak a personal language to them that others cannot necessarily follow. But a good business reporter can connect their readers to the numbers in ways that can make a deep impact on a community.

Knowing that the number of people drawing unemployment aid dipped by 27,000 to just under 4.5 million, the lowest number since late June, is pretty meaningless until you become a statistic. And I wonder how many Americans actually understand the significance.

I certainly didn't until I read an interesting caveat at the end of this AP story titled:

Hopes rise as jobless claims fall, trade gap eases.

Yes, the numbers dropped significantly, and the reporter actually states that this could indicate that employers are unwilling to make deeper cuts in their workforce.

Yes, hope springs eternal!

But at the end of the article, we find that these numbers do not count millions of Americans receiving extended benefits from emergency programs put in place during the recession. More than five million Americans are listed on these extended benefit rolls.

That's a meaningful number for me. Not only am I up against a lot of unemployed journalists for rare job openings in the media, but I'm up against a lot of Americans in the general job market as well.

As numbers go, statistics like these can be soul crushing.

And yet these numbers tell a story about where we're at as an economy and a country. They tell me that I have my work cut out for me, and that I might have to look outside traditional job sources.

I always argued with editors that attracting younger readers to newspapers would mean reaching them through other means than a print paper and by making traditional news coverage more meaningful by putting them into the coverage and showing them how various issues do or will impact their lives.

The problem is that most traditional newspaper coverage is written for and to a mature audience. Most publishers are loathe to disturb the 50+ set for whom number reporting has remained unchanged since they purchased their first houses many years ago.

Two of the best show-don't-tell journalism examples I can think of in the last two years happened on the radio. This American Life's "Giant Pools of Money," and "Another Frightening Show About the Economy" made for some of the most informative journalism I've seen, read or listened to ever. Period.

Yes, I'm a thirty something, and yes, This American Life appeals to my news delivery preferences. (I like to download episodes to my iPod Touch and listen in transit or during workouts or first thing in the morning while checking E-mail and the social networks) Still, the way the economic situation was simplified and brought to life in a full-hour show opened my eyes to the greater potential in number-related storytelling. Namely that numbers are a backdrop until you connect the impacted with the actual cause or causes. Once you've made this connection, the audience can follow the numbered pathway to its conclusion. Or lack thereof, as this continuing economic nightmare continues to show.

And if radio can do great show-don't-tell journalism, newspapers ought to be able to take it to a whole new level.

Tim