by Dan Lyons
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, a little voice inside my head keeps saying as I follow Zack and his gelled hair down the hall, my pulse thrumming in my temples.
Nine months ago I was the technology editor of Newsweek. In that job I did not even notice people like Zack, or Wingman, or even Cranium. They are the kind of people whose calls I would not return, whose emails I deleted without opening. Even Halligan and Shah were such small fry that I probably would not have taken time to meet them for coffee, and I certainly would not have written about them. And Zack? Good grief. He’s five years out of college, and his work experience consists of two journalism internships and three years in an entry-level job in a regional Google ad sales office.
Zack takes me to a cramped little shoebox of a room, about fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long, where twenty young women are packed into two rows, staring at laptops. This is the content factory. That is literally what they call it. These people are content creators. That is literally what they called themselves. “Hungry for more content? Click here to get some!” is something they write on little boxes that they place next to blog posts, hoping that the promise of “more content” will entice readers to stay on the site.
I smile and shake hands and go down the line, past a blur of Ashleys, Amandas, Brittanys, and Courtneys, realizing as I do that I am literally twice the age of these people, in some cases more than twice their age. “So where were you before this?” I ask some of them, who give me a strange look and say, “Uh, college?” I stop asking that question. They’re all women, they’re all white, and they’re all wearing jeans and sporting the same straight, shoulder-length hair. They all seem baffled by my presence. What is this old guy doing here? I smile and realize that I already cannot remember anyone’s name.
Next, Zack introduces me to the blog team, the people I will be working most closely with—Marcia, Jan, and Ashley. I’ve read their work already. They say things like totes magotes and awesomesauce, and produce blog articles like “5 Ways to Make Your Landing Pages Awesome,” and “7 Tips to Improve Your Lead Quality.” They write in a folksy style: “Hey, blogging’s hard, right? You don’t have to tell us!! But didya know there’s a remedy for those summer blogging blues? Well, there is, and we’re gonna tell you about it, so read on!”
I’m not sure what my relationship to these women will be. I’m not their boss. Zack is. Zack points to an empty desk. “I guess you can sit there,” he says. Instead of a chair, there is a big rubber ball—orange, of course—on a rolling frame. I’m not quite sure what to do. If I ask for a chair, I risk looking like an old fart who doesn’t know how to sit on a bouncy ball or like a prima donna demanding some kind of special treatment. But if I do sit on this thing I’m pretty sure that I will immediately fall off. I imagine myself, age fifty-two, toppling off an orange bouncy ball and onto the floor, as a bunch of young women look on and try not to laugh. Some awkwardness ensues as I ask Zack if it might be possible to find an actual desk chair. We scavenge a chair from a desk in another room. The crisis is averted.
Zack goes to his desk and gets to work on whatever it is that Zack does, while I take my seat at my little desk, which is empty save for a new MacBook Air. Is this really it? Is this my job? Will I really go to work every day and sit at this shitty little desk in this shitty little room? Are these people now my colleagues? Will I have to sit in meetings with them and listen to them talk? What exactly is my actual job? Once I finish doing all the first-day paperwork, once I have my picture taken and get my ID badge and set up my parking garage pass, what am I supposed to do? Zack seems to have no idea. He’s so new that he hasn’t even figured out what his job is, let alone mine.
I spend the day filling out paperwork and trying not to freak out. Surely, Halligan and Shah would not have hired me and then just stuck me in a room, working for Zack. There must be some kind of mistake. When Cranium gets here, he will sort things out. Then again, is it a bad sign that Cranium made such a big deal out of hiring me and then wasn’t here to meet me on my first day?
Stay calm, I tell myself. Take deep breaths. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t block out the sound of that little fuck-fuck-fuck voice, which keeps telling me that I’ve made a very big mistake. Soon I will discover that the little voice is correct.
One
Beached White Male
Nine months earlier, it’s the summer of 2012, and life is good. I’m fifty-one years old, happily settled into married life in a suburb of Boston, with two young kids and a job I love. At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world.
Then one day, without warning, it all just ends. It’s a Friday morning in June. The kids are at school. I’m sitting with my wife, Sasha, at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and going over the plans for our upcoming vacation, a three-week trip to Austria. It’s a bit of a splurge for us, but by using frequent flyer miles and staying in modest hotels we can just about afford it. Our kids—twins, a boy and a girl—are turning seven in a few weeks, and they’re finally old enough to handle an adventure. Sasha has just left her teaching job, because she’s been suffering from chronic migraines and spending too much time in emergency rooms. She needs time off to take care of herself. A few weeks in the Alps seems like a good way to start. We’ll miss her paycheck, and her insurance, which is first-rate, but I can get decent insurance from Newsweek, and in addition to my salary I’ve been making some money on the side by giving speeches.
So we’re good. Sasha can quit her job and we can still afford the vacation. It’s all going to be great. That’s what we’re telling each other as we pull up the website for one place where we’ll be staying, a cluster of chalets perched on a hillside in a remote village surrounded by mountains. A local guide takes tourists on day hikes and offers a rock-climbing class for kids. A nearby stable offers trail rides on sturdy little Haflinger horses with shaggy blond manes. We leave in three weeks.
My phone beeps. It’s an email from my editor, Abby. She wants to know if I can get on the phone. I go upstairs to my office and call her at the office in New York. I figure Abby wants to give me an update on the tech blog we’re launching. But unfortunately that’s not it at all.
“I have some bad news,” she says. “They’re making some cuts. Your job is being eliminated.”
I’m not quite sure what to say. On the one hand this should not come as a surprise. Newsweek has been losing money for years. Two years ago the magazine was sold to a new owner, who promised to turn things around. Instead we are losing more money today than we were two years ago. Subscribers and advertisers are drifting away. I suppose some part of me has been expecting this call. Still, I wasn’t expecting to get it today.
Abby says it wasn’t her decision to fire me. I ask her whose it was. She says she doesn’t know. But someone, somewhere, has made a decision. Abby is simply the messenger. There’s nothing she can do, and no one to whom I can appeal. This is obvious bullshit. Abby knows who made the decision. I’m betting it was Abby herself.
Abby is an old-time Newsweek person. She left the magazine before I joined, but three months ago she was recruited to come back as the executive editor. I was overjoyed when I found out I would be reporting to her. We’re old friends. We’ve known each other for twenty years. As soon as she arrived we started talking about launching a tech blog, which I would run. I figured I would have a year, maybe more, to get the blog off the ground. That’s why I thought my job was secure and why I am now sitting here, staring out my window, feeling as if I have been clubbed over the head.
“I think they just want to hire younger people,” Abby says. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.”
“Sure.” I’m
not angry. I’m just dumbfounded. “I get it.”
From outside comes the roar of a lawnmower. I glance out the window and see that the guys who mow our lawn have arrived in their truck. I make a mental note that this is one small luxury that we now will have to live without, because surely an unemployed man cannot pay someone else to mow his lawn. I’m not even finished getting fired yet and I’m already thinking about ways to save money. Should we get rid of cable TV? Will we stop going out to dinner? Can we still go to Austria?
Abby says she really likes me, and this was a really hard phone call for her to make, and she hates to do this because we’ve known each other for so long, and nobody ever wants to call up their friend and tell them this. In a way I actually start to feel bad for her, even though I’m the one getting fired.
I tell her I understand. I’m a business reporter, after all. This is the stuff I write about—legacy companies getting disrupted by new technologies, slowly going under, laying off workers. If I were running a magazine that was losing money, I would be looking to cut costs, too. I’d get rid of the expensive old guys and hire a bunch of hungry young kids. It makes sense.
I went into this job knowing that it probably wouldn’t last forever. Back in 2008, when I joined, Newsweek veterans were being offered buyouts and early retirement packages. And it wasn’t just Newsweek. Newspapers and magazines were dying out all over the place, disrupted by the Internet. Despite all that, Newsweek was still an amazing place, and even if the magazine only had a few years left in it, I still wanted to work there.
Now, on this sunny Friday morning, it’s over.
My last day will be in two weeks, Abby says. I will get no severance package, just two weeks of pay and whatever vacation time I’m owed. At the end of two weeks I’ll also lose my health insurance, but the HR people will help me figure out how to set up COBRA to continue my benefits.
Some of my colleagues who left when the magazine was sold in 2010 received packages equal to a year’s salary. I’d expected that if or when I got cut, I’d be given enough severance to provide a cushion. Two weeks seems inordinately harsh. I try to bargain. I ask Abby if they will keep me on for six months while I look for a new job. That will let me save face and make it easier for me to find my next job. Sorry, she tells me, but no. I offer to take a pay cut. That won’t fly either, she says. How about I take a different job, I say. It doesn’t have to be much, but it will keep me on staff, with benefits, while I look for something else.
Abby is not having any of it.
“Abby, I have kids.” There’s a quaver in my voice. I take a breath. I don’t want to sound panicked. “I’ve got twins. They’re six years old.”
She says she’s sorry, she understands, but there’s nothing she can do.
I tell her that my wife has just left her teaching job. I’ve just finished sending in the paperwork to move us from Sasha’s insurance to the insurance plan offered by Newsweek. The HR department at Newsweek must be aware of this. That was the “qualifying life event” that enabled us to join the Newsweek health plan outside of the annual open enrollment period.
“Look,” I say, “if you can just push back my end date and keep me on for a few months, I’ll at least be able to keep my health insurance, and I promise I’ll get another job and get out of here.”
But Abby, my old friend, a woman I’ve known since we were both in our twenties and starting out in the journalism business, says no, she can’t do it. In two weeks I’m done, and that’s that.
I hang up the phone, go downstairs, and tell Sasha what just happened. She’s stunned. Wasn’t I just telling her that it was safe for her to quit her job, because my Newsweek job was secure?
“I thought Abby was your friend,” Sasha says.
“I thought so, too.”
Sasha still has the vacation folder with the brochures and plane tickets and hotel and car rental confirmations out on the table.
“Maybe we should cancel the trip,” she says.
There’s no sense in that, I tell her. Some of the money has already been spent, in deposits that we can’t get back. “We should go,” I say. “We’ll go, and we’ll use the time to think about what we’re going to do next. We can do anything, right? We can start over. We can move someplace new. It’s a fresh start.”
I talk about Vermont. We’re always saying how cool it would be to live there. Our friends did that—one day they sold everything and moved to Vermont. They love it! Or there’s Boulder. Or Bozeman. We could live in the Rocky Mountains! We should make a list of the best places to live, rent a Winnebago, visit each one, and then decide. We could spend the whole summer traveling around the country! We could see the Grand Canyon, and Zion, and Yellowstone, and Yosemite. In a way this whole thing is a gift. Because now we have all this free time! When are we ever going to have a chance like this again?
Sasha knows that I’m full of shit, and she also knows I’m panicking, because this is what I do when I’m panicking—I talk and talk and talk. But even as I’m reeling through my list of fantasy mountain towns where I can wear plaid shirts and drive a pickup truck and grow a beard, Sasha has arrived at the truth of our situation, which she feels the need to explain to me, as if by speaking the words out loud she might feel more in control of the situation.
“Let’s just talk about where we are right now,” she says. She’s working hard to remain calm. “The reality is that I just quit my job, and I can’t get that job back. They’ve already hired someone else. And now you’ve been fired.”
“Laid off,” I say, because that sounds better.
“Point is, we’re both unemployed, and we have six-year-old twins, and no health insurance, and no income. And we’re about to go on a really expensive vacation.”
“Well,” I say, “when you put it like that.”
“How else would you put it?”
I launch back into my spiel about moving to the mountains, but she cuts me off. None of that is going to happen, and we both know it. We’re not going to spend the summer cruising around the United States in a Winnebago like the Griswolds on some zany adventure.
“Look,” I say, “I’ll get another job. I’m going to start hitting the phone today. Right now. I’m going to email everyone I know. I’ve got a bunch of speeches booked, which should keep us going into the fall. And I can pick up some freelance work.”
I’m trying to sound confident. But the truth is that I’m fifty-one years old and I have never gone looking for a job before. I’ve always had a job and then moved to a better one. I’ve never had to call my friends and ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of anything. I’ve always been the guy on the other end of that call, and I’ve always felt bad for those friends who were calling me. Sure, I told them, I’ll pass the word around. I’ll keep an eye open. I’m sure you’ll find something.
But we all know the reality of our situation. Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats.
Things are even worse if you’re over fifty. In what now seems like a cruel irony, I learned about this by reading my own magazine. In 2011, Newsweek published a cover story with the attention-grabbing headline THE BEACHED WHITE MALE. The cover depicted a middle-aged white guy in a suit, soaking wet, facedown on a beach at the water’s edge—maybe not dead, but definitely washed up.
The article described a whole generation of once-successful men who, having been laid off during the recession, or “Mancession,” as the magazine dubbed it, were now shuffling around in their bathrobes, stunned, emasculated, psychologically destroyed, humiliated in front of their wives and children, drifting through life like castrated zombies. In the new economy, age fifty was the new sixty-five. Hit fifty, and your company would find an excuse to fire you, and good luck trying to find another job. As for filing an age discrimination suit: Forget about it. You wouldn’t stand a chance. Even if you won your lawsuit, you’d never wo
rk again.
I’d read the article when it came out, but it hadn’t bothered me too much. I figured that somehow I was immune to this. Newsweek wasn’t doing well, but as long as the magazine remained in business, surely they would need a technology reporter?
Apparently not. Because suddenly, on this lovely sunny day in June, as I sit in my kitchen waiting for my kids to come home from school, wondering if I should tell them what happened and, if so, how best to present the news—right now I am no longer the technology editor of Newsweek. Instead, I am that guy on the cover of Newsweek: facedown on a beach, soaking wet, possibly dead. I am a Beached White Male.
I started working in newspapers in 1983, while I was still in college. After graduation I didn’t know what else to do, so I just kept working at newspapers. I thought about law school and business school, but didn’t have the heart for either. Originally I had been headed toward medicine, but I had fallen off the track and it seemed too late to start over. Newspapering didn’t seem like much of a career. It seemed like something to do until you discovered a career, or, as one of my reporter friends, a Brit with a background on Fleet Street, once told me: “It beats working for a living.” At some point I realized that I been working as a reporter long enough that journalism had become my career. It felt almost accidental.
In 1987, a friend of mine talked me into joining him at a newspaper aimed at the computer industry called PC Week, which was based in Boston. In those days Boston still had a lot of high-tech companies. I didn’t know anything about computers, but nobody else did, either. The personal computer was still a relatively new thing. We were getting in on the ground floor of what would become a huge new market.
