OT: "We have some concerns about your lack of stability..."

When I graduated journalism school, I was told I'd likely start my career in some podunk outpost on the edge of the universe. Some of my peers nonetheless set their sights on New York, Philadelphia, Boston, D.C., et al, while I looked westward toward these small towns, like Horace Greeley suggested many years before. I just knew I'd get the "call" after years of toil in these small towns where I perfected my craft and showed I had the writing ability to hang in the big cities.

Needless to say, that's not exactly how things turned out.

I first ended up in Winnemucca, Nevada, as the sports editor of The Humboldt Sun, the only daily newspaper in a county roughly the size of Vermont. I knew I wouldn't spend my career there because there's only so much you can do with one high school in the town and one out in the county, so when I applied for and was offered a job as a sports writer at the Denton Record-Chronicle, I took it.

I moved to Denton for the chance to cover some of the best high school sports in the country, and maybe do a sidebar on the University of North Texas before perhaps taking on one of those beats myself. When the sports editor position came open, I put in for it, but the managing editor had already hired someone, telling me he didn't think I was "management material," nor did he realize I had "any inkling" of being a manager. With the glass ceiling being paved over, I had no reason to stick around in Denton.

So then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, to cover minor-league hockey and high school sports at the Avalanche-Journal. Again, when one of the big-time college beats came open, I put in for it, the sports editor hemmed and hawed, and he brought in someone from a nearby paper to do the job. The things he said (or maybe the way he said them) made clear that he had no intention of considering me for any of the high-profile college beats, so I had no reason to stick around there for any length of time.

So then I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to cover the University of Wyoming men's basketball team; I hired on for football, then switched spots with my sports editor. I had the title of assistant sports editor, and I got a little management experience, but the thrust of my job was covering a shitty college basketball team. I burned out on it after three seasons and one near-miss of a coaching search, and after I found religion in regard to work-life balance, I headed for the copy desk...

...in Bellingham, Washington. There, I wreaked the havoc of designing a sports section five nights a week, taking game calls, the usual stuff. I bristled under an overbearing editor, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy at a paper run like the Bush administration — this is what we're doing, and you're either with us or against us. That might work on a 20-something eager to please, but not a veteran journalist, so I moved on again.

This time, it was to Davenport, Iowa, where management had a lighter hand, and I learned a little more about designing pages. I hit a bit of a wall, though, and admittedly I muddled through my life there, taking on a second job to pay the bills, until a friend called with an offer to edit a university magazine. Onward.

I came to Laramie, Wyoming, to edit UWyo, the magazine for alumni and friends of the University of Wyoming. After two-and-a-half years, oversight of the magazine changed, my job description changed, I bristled some more, and I'm now looking to move on again.

Save for a few minor tweaks (aka "spin"), this is what I told some people at a job interview a few days ago in response to the title of this blog, a comment from one of the hiring editors. She saw my résumé a few weeks ago and never mentioned my job-hopping, until I sat in her office a little after 10 EDT on Thursday morning. Over lunch a couple hours later I walked her through it, then did the same for someone else that same day. This was the first time in my career anyone had a problem with my transience.

I would have loved to hire into the perfect situation straight out of college, a place where I got the necessary guidance and room to improve, plus management that really tried to help people succeed within those walls. It would be great to mark 15 years (or 10, or even 5) at one place and earn that extra week of vacation and the resulting raise, as well as a cake in the breakroom, a nameplate on the desk, or a place in the parking lot. It doesn't work that way, though. Journalism is transient — you have to go where you find work, as opposed to teaching or law or medicine, where you can find work wherever you go — and clearly I've embraced that transience. For better or for worse, I've bounced around.

So how many people drop into the ideal situation early in their careers and then stick around forever? How justified was this interviewer in extrapolating from her own heavily-tenured staff that everyone should have X number of jobs on their résumé after X years? And who would have guessed that my constant searching of that ideal situation, that sweet spot, would someday work against me?