At the risk of disparaging my previous employers, but wanting to explain my absense, let me just say that the newspaper gig crushed any desire I had to do extra writing. The fact that I’m not hunched over my keyboard writing up a meeting on deadline tonight is still freaking me out a little bit. But honestly, it was a fun job and I’m glad I did it. I honestly wouldn’t have quit if it weren’t for the new opportunity that showed up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What do I bring away from three months (honestly, it seemed a lot longer than that) in the fast-paced world of small town journalism? For one, I feel much more confident about my ability to work in this field. I was really never completely sure while in school, but just jumping right into it like I did was a great way to shock my reporting skills into action. The other thing, and this is something that I’ve heard about but never really believed in, is that I get a huge rush out of writing a good story. Part of it is the fact that I had competition (The Daily News Transcript), making it that much more enjoyable to get a big scoop (as much as those exist in Norwood). The other part is just watching all my thoughts coalesce into a coherent story. It’s tough to explain, but seeing the final output, and having it not suck, is just an awesome feeling.

The downside, though, was a seemingly endless string of late nights, along with  sitting through two hour meetings and getting nothing (which only happened a few times) and the pure aggravation of not being able to get the person I needed to talk to on the phone for days at a time. Oh, and the pay. That really killed the fun for me.

Although, Norwood was a great place to start my career. The people there were either crazy or brilliant at what they did, and there was no shortage of great quotes, characters and stories to cover. I realized, as my last two weeks ticked by, that everybody I dealt with on a regular basis had pretty much lived in town for their entire lives. Given that the average age of this group was definitely north of 50, I was just a blip on the radar to them. Kind of puts things in perspective, I guess.

So anyway, I’m now working for Harvard (technically as an independent consultant) at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. I work normal, nine-to-five hours, and I get paid more, so I should be back onto this blogging business more often now. My last big hurdle is tracking down an apartment for the fall, but other than that, things are going well.

I’ll try to write more about the new job in the coming days, but for tonight I just wanted to pull a Favre and announce my unretirement. React accordingly.