100 Years of The Daily Mississippian

An old boss of mine turned 100 years old this past weekend -- The Daily Mississippian, my college newspaper and the first place I earned my journalism "stripes," so to speak. Being on the other side of the world and all I couldn't exactly make the centennial events (but hopefully a drink or two was had on City Grocery's balcony on my behalf). But more than 15 years after I finished college, I've still got many a fond memory of the old DM, my training ground for a career that's been changing and shifting ever since. Since 1911, the DM has been the voice of debate and news at the University of Mississippi.

It's stunning to look back at my DM term - roughly 1992-1995 or so - and see how much has changed. The "Internet" was barely a notion then, the idea of computer layout of our pages was a shocking novelty (just a year or so before I came along, the paper was still using an ancient pre-desktop publishing system of pagination). The job I have today -- production editor for a major metropolitan newspaper website -- simply didn't exist then.

The DM was a terrific place to hang out in college, in the basement of Farley Hall and just across the hall from the hip campus radio station. Putting out a five-day-a-week newspaper felt like being in a club, where a variety of raconteurs, oddballs and iconoclasts were shoved together out of their shared love of the journalism dream. I held a variety of semi-official "titles" there -- opinion page editor, features writer, assistant entertainment editor or something like that, columnist, cartoonist -- and while I didn't live down there 24-7 in the basement like a lot of the staff, I felt the first tinglings of the familiar newsroom buzz that is still an intoxicant to any newshound. We alumni still fondly speak of "The Ice Storm of 1994" which closed down the campus and we scrambled to create an 8-page "EXTRA" edition to cover.

An awful lot of the newspaper's controversy revolved around Ole Miss' evolving place in the post-integration world -- this was a campus which was integrated by the government forcibly in 1962, just 30 years before I arrived, and the wounds were raw -- bullet marks still speckled the administration building columns. When I was there one of the editors was the great Jesse Holland, only the second African-American editor of the paper. I still remember the day some local redneck rang up and got Jesse on the phone and then angrily said, "I wanna speak to the WHITE editor!" Sorry, Mr. Cracker, the times have a-changed and Jesse's since gone on to be the Associated Press's US Supreme Court correspondent. Folks who haven't lived in Mississippi still give it a lot of scorn today, but I tell you, I was there to watch the world ever-so-gradually changing. I'd love to know how that redneck's mind was blown by President Obama.

I learned an awful lot at the DM -- I interviewed California's ex-governor (and once again governor today) Jerry Brown, I met Henry Kissinger, hung out with local writer-made-big John Grisham, and wrote vaguely pretentious newspaper columns about my first loves and the music I was listening to -- the kind of columns every 22-year-old writes and thinks nobody else has ever done.

But the biggest charge I ever got at the DM was doing my very own daily newspaper strip for a year or so -- "Jip," a kind of goofy pastiche of Martin Wagner's "Hepcats" with "Bloom County," "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury" that was like flying by the seat of my pants every day as I sat at the drawing board trying to come up with gags and one-liners and characters that seemed at least slightly real to me. It was a real stretch of the creative muscles and an utter blast to do.

These days I work in a "digitally active newsroom" where I do things like live-blog the Royal Wedding, a sentence which would've been half-incomprehensible in 1994. Unlike many of my old pals from the DM, I'm still hanging on in the journalism industry despite its many seismic changes and cutbacks -- and I'm always grateful to the ol' DM for helping get it all started for me. Happy birthday.

All the news that's fit to tweet

I've worked in journalism for 15+ years now, but rarely have I enjoyed the kind of immediacy I do with my new online job, where all it takes to disseminate your story to the world is a click of the button. This week has been a non-stop onslaught of breaking news -- the royal wedding, some Osama character you might've heard about, and an extraordinarily rare fatal tornado right here in Auckland yesterday.
 
For both the big global news stories of the last week I've been tasked with running a kind of NZ-centric Storify feed on the website of "vox populi," filtering Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more into a giant mass o' opinion that runs concurrently with the more hard-news stories. This sort of aggregation is a kind of reporting that would've been hard to imagine 10 years ago -- there's a massive, ever-sprawling pool now of rants and raves and viewpoints online, and it never ever stops. As I "live tweeted" the royal wedding I found it fascinating -- the flow of information is so fast on the Twitter/Facebook feeds that you literally have to just grab and run -- and it was also kind of dizzying, too. After 6 hours straight of reading the world's Tweets on Wills and Kate your brain does kind of turn into mush.
 
And then the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, met his logical end Monday and it was a whole other set of tweets and comments to gather up. This story was very different from the royal wedding and tended to arouse all kind of firm views. As a fence-straddler, I found myself kind of turned off both by the bloodthirsty patriotism and the sanctimonious moralizing from both extremes.

I agree, people who live in America have no idea how utterly awful the mobs shouting "USA! USA!" looks from overseas, but I also think that at this point in its history, America desperately needed a "win." It seems like dozens of my US Facebook friends are unemployed now, there's a cynicism in US society that never quite goes away, and this long-desired news gave the country something to celebrate, as tacky as some of the cheering may have seemed from afar. 
 
Both stories were strange to watch as an American living in New Zealand -- one dealt with the British monarchy and the possible future king of New Zealand, while one offered a very US-centric kind of catharsis that I don't imagine as many New Zealanders might have felt.

The Twitter/Facebook beast is something wholly new in journalism -- a never-ceasing flow of quotes without having to pick up a notebook. During President Obama's speech on Monday 4,000 tweets came per second. This quoteflow is the sort of thing that has newspapers and journalists questioning their relevance -- although I fall on the side of good journalism still being firmly necessary, as a way to filter through the impossibly dense voice of humanity online these days. By night's end I had 15,000+ hits on the Osama Storify feed -- a kind of instant gratification journalists rarely get.

Once upon a time the question used to be, how do I get the information? It's then moved on to how fast can I get the information? But maybe as the world continues to change every millisecond, the new question might be, where does the information stop?

A change is gonna come

... So I haven't been blogging as much as I once did, because, well, blogging is on the wane, says The New York Times, so it must be true. After some initial trepidation, I have to admit I've been spending a bit of time on trendy Twitter, while Facebook is also one of my frequent haunts. But as I approach the end of year 7 (!!!) of blogging here, I don't imagine i'll entirely give it up in the near future. Twitter is specious, fluffy and highly short attention span -- but it's also a valuable news and networking tool, as I particularly noticed during the Christchurch earthquake down here last month. Yet I do like to ramble on for longer than 140 characters as well, so my aging Spatula Forum still has its place, even if I only get on here four or five times a month now. I don't see any need to give up one platform in favour of another. Part of the digital world these days is sorting out all the noise and figuring out what tools work best for you.

The landscape changes very, very fast online these days. What was hip a year ago can become forgotten overnight (hey, remember MySpace or LiveJournal?). I picked up my first iPhone the other day, and it is a fantastic, utterly addictive tool -- just 10 years ago it would've seemed something out of science fiction that I could download, say, the works of Shakespeare in an app for free and have it in my pocket. I'm a creaky old gent of nearly 40, and it's hard to imagine what tech will be considered everyday when little Peter is my age. My iPhone 4 will likely seem a charming antique (unless of course our ape overlords have taken over by then).

As a sign of the times I'm starting a new job next month too -- diving wholeheartedly into the digital journalism realm which is where an awful lot of my industry is going. I'll be working for NZ's biggest newspaper web site and am quite excited about the bold new realms I'll be exploring. There's still a lot that "dead tree" newspapers still have to offer, but any journalist or media company that is ducking its head in the sand over this Internet "fad" is going to be facing extinction. On to the brave new world!

Death and dying in the newspaper industry

...Another day, another slew of terrible news for the newspaper industry. The Seattle P-I joins the Rocky Mountain News in the papers who are no more pile, and according to a lot of folks, it's just getting started. The tipping point has been reached and it's all downhill from here.

The new 2009 report on the State of the News Media by Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism doesn't mince words: the first sentence is, "Some of the numbers are chilling."

Pretty much every journalist I know back in the US has been hit by this -- I know a half-dozen former co-workers who've been made redundant, or had to face salary cuts just to stay afloat. These are good folks who don't deserve this. NZ's journalism scene isn't faring a lot better, but it's smaller and more compact. You'll see newspapers morphing to the web model like the P-I, which is workable if done well (and an importance is put on solid, in-depth reporting as well as the breaking-news-by-the-second that websites excel at). A lot of small, crochety papers that are still debating whether to cut "Dear Abby" to four days a week will die. A lot of journalists will enter new careers. I am hopeful of my own job security in the industry, for now, but have to admit I'm uncertain too if journalism is where I'll be in 10, or even five years.

I've written before on the industry collapse (I don't think "slump" is quite the right word anymore) -- and I've said that I don't think newspapers are dying. But they are radically changing, rearranging and some of it is quite messy. And the human cost is enormous -- the industry lost at least 10 percent of newsroom jobs last year, and the toll is likely to just keep getting higher. One of the previous papers I worked at had 3 very talented full-time photographers. It now has one. It's a vicious circle; you cut staff to contain costs, quality plummets, and less people read the paper so you cut more staff. Until, like many a paper now faces, you close your doors. Two-newspaper towns are now a rarity in the US; it's a matter of time until some are no-newspaper towns.

News-gathering as a profession isn't going anywhere, but I do mourn the traditions of the past -- newspapering is a terribly romantic business in my mind, despite the often boring nitty-gritty of reality. I think of Cary Grant and "His Girl Friday," of HL Mencken and Herb Caen and Lewis Grizzard tapping out columns, of long days and nights and the rewarding roar of the press at the end of it all. Something of that is being lost.

I read the news today, oh boy...

I don't talk an awful lot about behind-the-scenes stuff in newspapers, well, because I work in them and it's easy to turn the wrong head. But if you've been paying the least bit of attention, it's hard not to notice it's kind of grim days to be in the newspaper industry, no matter where in the world you live... Layoffs and "right-sizing" have been the trend in the industry through much of the '00s.

If you read websites like Poynter, it's been job slash after job slash (sorry, "buyout packages"). Papers I know or have worked for have just been chopping staff left and right. The tally according to one web site: More than 8,000 jobs. Just yesterday, Fairfax Media which owns like half the papers in Australia/New Zealand, announced massive cuts. Y'know, in the name of synergy and stuff like that.

Websites like angryjournalist.com thrive off the frustration in the industry these days. I'm better than I used to be, but I still get angry myself. I remember one paper I worked at where over the course of about a year I went from having 7 employees in my newsroom to having 2 1/2 (one part-timer). It sucked, to be honest, and left me worn-out and bedraggled at the end. But newspapers have problems, and for the bean-counters, cuts are often the way to effect change. Not always the right way, but a way. The problem is when staff is cut but management doesn't change the amount of work to reflect that – bodies are eliminated, but you also need to rethink how you're delivering news when you have a "leaner, meaner" staff. Instead too often the mentality is "less people, same work," which inevitably results in "burned-out staff, crappy, error-ridden and uninspired newspapers."

I keep seeing things about few people under 40 read papers any more, and it's hard to disagree. Newspaper audiences often seem fossilized to be mostly the 50+ age group, and well, when they're gone...

Still, I like to think positive. I firmly believe we're in the middle of big changes in the newspaper industry. Newspapers are not dying, merely transforming. It's truly impossible to see a massive shift when you're in the middle of it, but I think this whole decade has been about newspapers mutating. We're "old school" media but when you get down to it, newspapers are at their core the best-reported, best-produced and most influential kind of media there is. All others tend to follow our lead, not overtake it. We're changing into something smaller and tighter, but hopefully also of value. But anyone who thinks newsrooms are going to operate like it's 1988 still are living in a dream world.

But y'know, for a field that's all about being 'Next," newspapers are often very conservative, and yes, slow. Smaller papers in particular will happily putter along with things like old crusty "Alley Oop" comics because they don't want to offend the older readers by dumping 'em. And papers big and small alike often tend to be run inefficiently, either with excess staff, overpaid "marquee" journalists or just plain mismanagement. Owners often just start chopping away randomly because they do see some of the inefficencies embedded in the system. It adds up to the kind of journalistic "perfect storm" we're seeing these days.

It's all made for a fearful time to be a journalist. I like to think my own job is fairly secure, partly because I am part of a company that's looking ahead and rethinking the traditional way things are done. But you never know. Journalism is at its height a noble calling, producing great thinkers, great inspiration and great headlines. But when it comes to newspapers, it's also a calling that's rather hobbled, heartsick and uncertain right now. We are better than TV, and the best of the Internet follows our lead, I firmly believe.

I want to stay in this industry, but I recognize that print 'n' ink is just part of what we do now. It's exciting times. It's also kind of scary ones.

You know it's going to be a bad day when...

So I was at work this morning, and I kept getting annoyed by ants. Crawling on my arms, etc. I was irked at the low level of housekeeping at my job that resulted in ants everywhere. Then I stuck my hand in my backpack for something, pulled it out and my hand was covered in ants, like some horror movie special effect. My entire pack was swarming with the buggers, who had somehow gotten into my lunch packed the night before and colonized my entire pack, which I then unawares brought to work. And sat right by my feet.

Naturally I ran out of the office shrieking like a schoolgirl, smacking ants off my hand, throwing my ant-infested sandwiches out into the rain and shaking my backpack madly. Spent the morning scratching lingering ants out of my clothes, covered in ant bites. And no lunch.

Bloody ants, I say.

30 Days of Bloggery: Questions Answered

Well, Roger gave me a few questions to answer the other day, so here we go:

Where do you get your news about the the US? Do you find yourself interested, at arm's length, what?

99% of it from online or from local coverage (which is mostly picked up from British papers like The Independent, which has an amusing slant to their coverage of the current administration. I'm still very interested in what goes on "at home" and still spend a lot of time reading US websites like The New York Times, Washington Post and SF Gate, as well as papers I used to work for. I am totally up to date on the Britney Spears beat.

Where do you get your NZ news?
From work, really - I work with APN Media which owns much of the biggest papers in the country, and am a regional chief editor for the Napier paper and work with several others. So I'm pretty plugged in to "the system" so to speak.

What is the nature of NZ news anyway? Is it as good as most countries in covering the world (something the US does poorly unless it affects us directly)?

This is kind of a tricky one to answer as I work in the industry here and don't want to "bite the hand" I feed so to speak. I find that from my perspective, often the papers are far bolder (or biased) than I'm used to seeing in their political views, and NZ's small size often means teacup-sized issues get blown up into armageddons. (For instance when David Beckham came to Wellington for a one-day visit last year, from the hysterical press coverage you would've thought the Pope came to town and sang the theme from "Cats" naked. In the US it's like, eh, Beckham, OK, what's Paris doing?) Generally it's a little higher on hyperbole than US papers but not quite as tabloidy as British papers, somewhere in between. I think any American journalist would be surprised by how small an industry it is here.

As for world coverage, I do think we have a nice variety of global coverage -- the US still takes a big chunk of it, but we have a lot more coverage of Indonesia, such as events in Burma recently, or Australian politics. Much of it is picked up from British papers but there's still a decent amount of foreign correspondents. In fact I'd say as a whole NZ papers show a "wider view" of the world than too many American papers do, where you have to struggle to find more than the latest bombings.

30 Days of Bloggery: Friday

So you may recall that I usually work 6am-4 pm, four days a week. I've gotten used to the whole waking up at 5 a.m. thing but now that we've moved a lot closer to my work, in the interest of being a buff and fit fellow I'm trying to walk the 3k (about 1.9 miles) most days. Which wouldn't be a hassle except that it can be tough to wake up throw on clothes wash face head out door for a half-hour walk right at crack o'dawn, I'm finding. I usually wake up about halfway through the walk if my iPod plays something jazzy.

On shuffle 5.25 this a.m.: "19th Nervous Breakdown," Rolling Stones. Oh yeah.

Beautiful sunrises, too.

• Congratulations to my father-in-law, painter Peter Siddell who earlier this week was named a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit -- it's one of the annual New Year's Honours and a huge accomplishment, basically the equivalent of what a knighthood once was. To put it in perspective, he was one of only five people in the entire country to get the gong this go-round, courtesy of the Queen of England herself!

Hey look, I'm a real businessman

So I went on my first official business trip for Pagemasters Wednesday, flying with my boss across the country from Auckland to Napier. (Which, to give you an idea of how wee NZ really is, took about one hour of flight time.) We were visiting the Hawke's Bay newspaper which is about to become one of our clients, and I always enjoy visiting the art-deco haven of Napier -- although the freakish Spring winds from Antarctica nearly froze us half to death. Our company is gradually taking on the layout and copy editing for the newspapers in Napier, Rotorua, Tauranga and Whangarei, and I'm one of the team helping this get off the ground, so hopefully I'll get a little more North Island traveling in during coming months. I realized that was the first time I'd actually gotten out of the Auckland metropolitan area since we arrived here nearly (gasp!) one year ago, with the exception of our trip to Sydney earlier in the year. I really must get out and about more.

Peter: "Daddy can we go to the wave pool and the museum and the beach and maybe the ice cream shop?"

Yes, it must be my day off....

Excuse me while I kiss the mattress

...Egad, is that the time? So this week I began my new work schedule, which is on the one hand is grand because I'm now working only four days of the week, but which is bad because I'm now working four 10-hour shifts starting at 6 am. Which takes a little getting used to. I generally like working early rather than later (no 3-12 midnight morning paper shifts for me, thank you) but it's still been rather a shock to the system to get up at 5 am in the morning these days. I'm starting to adjust but the first week there's been a lot of yawning and excessive coffee consumption. It is swell to get off while it's still light (and the clockwork chirping of the tui birds lets us know it's nearly spring), and, the main reason for this schedule, it allows us to put Peter in day care less of the week. So if it gets me greyer and wrinklier (a 10-hour shift is a little like a mini-marathon I think) it's worth it in the end.

And of course New Zealand has gone mad for the Rugby World Cup right now and I've been doing a lot of work relating to that. I know about as much about rugby (and well, sports in general) as I do about Swedish tax systems, and so I admit I've had a lot of baffled moments as I try to sort out the difference between the scrum and the pitch and why the Wallabies and Springboks are such bastards. Which doesn't help when you're trying to edit copy about the game. (Which I realized to my utter astonishment lasts something like 40 days. Eat that, Super Bowl!) NZ is pretty sport-mad in general, even more than the US I think I'd say. Not all New Zealanders but Joe Kiwi (if there is such a person) is pretty well into the rugby and the cricket and so forth. I've never really been anti-sport, but neither have I been particularly into it ... too much time spent on books, music, comics and movies, and, oh yeah, family. But with American sport, you at least just sort of pick up some of it in the culture and I know the general workings of football and baseball and the like just through osmosis. However, rugby and the rest baffles me and I have to play catch-up just to get what I'd otherwise have picked up growing up here. I will say these players are sheer giants who put wimpy US football (with its padding and helmets) to shame. Never get between a 400-lb. Tongan and his ball. It's unhealthy.

Of newspapers, vampires and the Tardis

Random thoughts:

• Work, work, work, work. It's been good but extraordinarily busy these last couple of weeks as we constantly add new publications and magazines to the roster of those we're dealing with, which means learning whole new styles and designs pretty much every week. At some point by the end of the year it will settle down into more of a routine but until then, very hectic but mostly enjoyable. I've been busily designing many of the pages and sections in the NZ Herald, which is pretty nifty – a year ago I'd worried what I would do once I left my job in Oregon, but I've ended up working with the country's biggest newspaper and seeing my fingerprints in there daily. ("Whole lotta love for Zeppelin fans" – oh yeah, that's my headline, baby!). And next month it looks like I'll get to do a little traveling around NZ to some of the smaller regional newspapers we're also adding to the roster.

• But when I haven't been working, I've been slaying. Vampire slaying, that is. One or two of you may recall way back before we emigrated I mentioned that I had never watched the famed "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" TV show before, and having sampled it, was determined to catch the entire 7 seasons worth of DVDs from start to finish. So how's that ambitious project going? Well, the wife and I have been zipping along renting DVDs in Buffy-land lately, due largely to the fact NZ Television's five or six channels have next to nothing to watch. We're about midway through Season 3, and it's been some of the best TV I've watched in eons. I missed "Buffy" first time 'round as by the time I noticed it the mythology seemed too daunting – and the main character was named Buffy, so I figured it was Beverly Hills 90210 with fangs. But really, as a zillion others have pointed out before me, "Buffy" has a rich subtext using horror as a metaphor for high school and life in general. The second season found the show settling into a wonderful groove combining angst, romance and monster-of-the-week kung fu with flair, and the great tragic Buffy/Angel love affair packs a real sting. Joss Whedon's characters are so great that I sometimes find the marquee violence and kung fu distracting to the quieter scenes. I can't wait to see what happens next (Spike came back in the latest one we watched – hurray!), and it's cool to know I've got 3 1/2 seasons to go. (The hard part is avoiding spoilers on the Internets about the future of Buffy.)

• And did I mention I've never ever watched "Dr. Who" before either? Well, not until last weekend... Yep, I'm a failure as a geek. The next obsession lurks ahead in the Tardis, I guess!

“I just get sleepy when I read"

Ah yeah, work work work, now I remember what that's like. I know I haven't written much about the new job yet, but that's because it's constantly in flux, and I've been kind of learning a gazillion things every day. The nature of a start-up means it's always changing and so what I'm doing now I won't be doing a month from now, and so forth. I have gotten to design several pages for NZ's flagship paper The New Zealand Herald so that's been cool. Adjusting to the working life too after nearly a year out of the trenches has been tougher than I thought, too, and I'm missing the heck out of Peter of course. It's hard to know when to shut down and I keep having dreams of obscure computer command codes. Yeesh. Anyway, it's all a curious and action-packed environment and I will write more about it eventually when I figure out exactly what it is I have to say.

But anyway, this story about our non-reading habits just depressed me so much I had to blog two bits about it. Too many Americans don't like to read, do they? New Zealand actually has a pretty amazingly book-happy society (especially considering how damned expensive books are here), but of course like anywhere else there's a hefty non-reading population too I imagine. I just don't get it myself -- books have been like air for me since I was 6 years old or so. I'm constantly reading something, and usually manage 6-9 books a month. I actually get a bit jittery, like a caffeine withdrawal, when I don't have a book I'm currently reading. Wish more people out there were reading. All the arguments about "I don't have any time to read" don't really hold up when most people have no problem finding the time to veg out for 2-3 hours a night in from of the ol' telly, do they? Go read a book, people!

There is nothing wrong with your set

...Ah, yes, the blog. I'm still deep in training for my new job, and it's been a bit like going to journalism boot camp (learning new computer system, new editing system, new styles, etc). I'm enjoying it a lot but my brain is basically spinning with information. Next week we'll start moving from theory into practice and actually putting out newspapers. What little free time I've got is spending time with the family – who've all been sick as dogs the past couple weeks, too. (Avril and the boy are actually on antibiotics right now.) It's been a bit like living in a M*A*S*H unit. So far I've dodged the illness bullet mostly, although in the very act of typing these words I've likely contracted the plague. So it goes. I'll attempt an actual post sometime soon.

So it begins...

First day tomorrow at the new gig. Excited but a bit jittery. Digging all the "work clothes" out of the dusty closet and polishing 'em up. Strange to return to the realm of wage earner after nearly a year off. First time since early 2004 both the wife and I have been working at the same time!

So anyway, wish me luck, I'll return sometime soon after I find my sea legs in the high-stakes world of New Zealand publication editing!

The last week

Today kicks off the final week before Peter enters day care as I prepare to start my new job... P starts day care next Monday on a part-time basis (I don't start work until the 23rd, and we wanted to ease him in the first week). It's a strange feeling, and I have to admit I'm both regretful and relieved at the same time. I quit my last job Aug. 31, 2006, and in the past 10 months or so I've spent far more time with Peter than I did the first 2 1/2 years of his life. That's something I'll never forget, being able to enjoy the kind of "quality time" that far too many parents just can't swing in the hectic modern world.

I just wish I hadn't spent about 35% of this time whining about not having a job, being annoyed at our rambunctious toddler and generally freaking out a bit about the whole upheaval of moving 6,000 miles overseas. It's human nature to be never entirely satisfied, I guess. The first few months after Avril returned to work and I was having to look after the boy, like, all day, were definitely the worst, and in retrospect I had some real depression going on then. You take away everything that defines your life and replace it with new stuff, it'll shake you up a bit. But by March or so I started to realize this time was going to be very finite and before I knew it Peter would magically transform like our nephew Max, who sprouted into an impossibly gangly, taciturn teenager seemingly overnight. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Filling the days got a lot easier when we started going to Playcentre – as anyone who minds a toddler will tell you, keeping them occupied is the hardest part. And Peter and I have had several expeditions exploring Auckland, the museums, zoo, et cetera. It's been great to watch that little mind develop and his constant growth. While he's been big on asserting his independence (#1 favorite phrase: "No I want to do that!") he also isn't shy about expressing his love (#2 favorite phrase: "I really want to cuddle you"). He loves to ask questions (#3 favorite phrase: "Why do...[fill in the blank; i.e. yesterday's question about why worms live in the ground]"), and keeps coming up with ever-more elaborate fantasy play schemes that make me hope he'll be as creative as an adult as he is as a kid. He's overall an incredibly happy, excited and smart kid. But he also requires a heck of a lot of energy to keep up with and I admit the notion of paying professionals to do this for some of the day is rather alluring.

I am definitely ready to go back into the workforce and excited about what'll happen there. The novelty of having a 3-year-old as my major social outlet grew old a while ago. But I have to admit it's all been full of a lot of little wonders too and hopefully I can store that somewhere in my head and summon it back up whenever I get sick of the novelty of working again. Meantime I'll enjoy this last week.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

So I haven't been posting a lot lately and some may have noticed I haven't been posting much at all about "real life" the last several weeks. That's because there's been a lot of changes going on, and I haven't wanted to write about it until it's all a little clearer -- and not jinx myself. Long story short, I've lined up a very spiffy new job and we've enrolled Peter in day care starting in a couple weeks, which is a big transition for us from the routine we've established the last 10 months or so.

Ever since we got back from Sydney, we've been thinking hard about where we are on our so-called "plan" and how we'd like to eventually own our own house here. That meant I'd need to return to the work force. Amazingly, I had an incredibly quick job search due to a combination of luck and timing and lined up a very promising job in less than a week! I'll be working as a "regional deputy senior sub-editor" (that's a long title, ain't it?) for a company owned by the Australian Associated Press that is taking on the editing, layout and design for APN Media, which owns the New Zealand Herald, Listener magazine and a host of other smaller papers. It looks like I'll be starting toward the end of July – a few details remain to be worked out. I'm pretty psyched as this is a huge company I'll be joining and it offers some real challenges. It's been just shy of a year since I worked, and while it's been a fantastic experience both as a Dad and traveling around, that itch to get back in the trenches has been pretty strong too.

And so we're putting P in day care which is something we've managed to avoid his first 3 1/2 years. I've been really lucky to spend my days with him this past year and being a stay-at-home dad has changed my whole view of parenting, but it wasn't feasible to do it forever and I really knew I wasn't going to feel like I "lived" in New Zealand unless I was working here too. It's going to be tough giving our little man up to strangers for 8 hours a day or so but he's ready for it... if anything it's going to be a lot harder on Mom and Dad than it will him, I imagine. We've found a really good center in a good location.

Anyway, that's what's up with us right now. I have a feeling my blogging will get even less frequent once I start work, but I'll try to keep a presence up on here. And right now I need to bone up on my NZ journalism style!

Meanwhile, in the world of paying journalism

...So if you're interested in seeing a sample of some of that freelancing I'm doing lately, here's a pretty decent-sized piece by yours truly that appears in today's Weekend Herald (New Zealand's largest newspaper) -- a profile of the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand. Cheers!

Hip hip hurray, ask me questions today

• Hurray for me, I finally got a paying freelance gig. Not that I'll be able to buy a new car or anything, but hey, it's ink in print and was fun to write. If there were more hours in the day I'd figure out how to write a little more these days... (Not that blogging isn't wonderful, but it doesn't pay the bills, does it?)

• Hurray for Peter, he's going to Playcenter now three days a week with me. Playcenter is a nifty NZ parent-run co-op kinda like kindergarten but not exactly, because there are no teachers and we parents run the session. Which is a lot of fun but also kinda exhausting at first, particularly if you give piggy-back rides to a half-dozen toddlers and then tow 7 of them around in a big firetruck for 20 minutes or so. Ackthpp.

• Hurray for you - I have no ideas about what else to write tonight, so instead, I'll do a Reader Q&A – if you have any questions you want to ask me, whether they be about life in NZ, being a stay-at-home bum, Peter's latest antics, what my favorite song right now is, go for it. Ask away in the comments and I shall reply in the next post. Hey, that's much easier than trying to write something myself!

OK, now I'm going to turn off the lights, turn on the iPod and groove to Neil Young's "Tonight's The Night" for a spell....

The latest from Aotearoa

...Yeah, I'm a slacker about blogging lately. Sorry about that. Delayed cultural shock setting in and so forth.

In any case, the big news from this week is that wife Avril has gotten a job. Hurrah! She starts Monday as an applications officer with the New Zealand Real Estate Licensing Board, which basically means she'll be handling all licensing for real estate agents throughout the country. Pretty cool and excellent salary. Not too bad for just over 3 weeks in country!

What all this means is that I get to be "Mr. Mom" for a while and take care of 2 3/4-year-old Peter probably at least until after the New Year, when I want to really start looking for some part-time journalism work. (In the meantime, I hope to try some freelancing.) But at the same time we don't want to put Peter in day care full time if we can help it so part-time is probably all I'm looking at for now.

Father/son bonding, here I come!

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

So today's my last day at work as we begin the long and winding journey that takes us to New Zealand. It's a weird feeling – I've been working here 4 1/2 years, far longer than I've ever worked at one newspaper before. I didn't quite think I'd be here nearly 5 years when we drove up in March 2002 — I was just glad to flee the snow-bound hills of Lake Tahoe, which were utterly gorgeous but crammed with ice half the year, and tourists the other half, and impossibly expensive to live in. Plus, I really had gotten tired of political head games with my then-bosses.

So anyway, Roseburg looked nice, and I'd always wanted to live in Oregon. The paper was great, still part of the same company but quite autonomous, and a six-day daily as opposed to the mostly weekly papers I'd worked at up till then. I've learned a hell of a lot here, far more than I did at previous jobs. It's mostly been a great experience, some ups and downs, but I leave it with genuine regret rather than "Oh my god I can't wait to get out of here" feelings. Yeah, I've been ready to go for a year or so, but that's mostly because I'm an antsy restless personality. (Or to quote The Replacements, "Look me in the eye / and tell me that I'm satisfied.")

I figure I've been here for about 1,500 or so editions of The News-Review, edited countless stories, written 100 or so in-depth feature stories, about 350 movie, music and book reviews, a hundred or two editorials, won a dozen or so ONPA (Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association) awards and watched the newsroom staff roll over a couple times as it tends to do at small papers. I'm ready to move on. Thanks to everyone I've worked with here for making it a fun ride for nearly 5 years.

Giving up your job willingly is always an odd sensation, like diving into the deep end without a rope. I did this once before, in 1997 when I migrated from Mississippi to California without a plan other than "find a job," and I gave up a pretty fun job then too just to avoid staleness. Of course, then I didn't have a kid, wife etc. So there's a certain amount of crazy fear with doing this, of realizing we won't have a steady paycheck till November or December at earliest. But it's cool – we've got savings, and are ready to have adventures. God knows I don't want to be one of those people that spend 20, 30, 40 years at the same job at the same desk. Better to be a little uncertain and have stories worth telling, I figure.

We're going offline as we wrap up our preparations to move back down to California, so no blogging for the next week or so. If you want your fix, hey, buy my book!!