Roy Exum
A website that specializes in jobs just came out with a list of the best and the worst, the finding based on “financially lucrative, abundant opportunities for advancement” and physical demands. The best jobs, according to CareerCast.com, may indeed be lucrative but appear pretty boring to me. The top five are actuary, audiologist, mathematician, statistician and biomedical engineer. The worst five? A newspaper reporter, Lumberjack, enlisted military personnel, cook, and broadcaster.
Having spent a lifetime in the worst job in America, I have a far different view, but I understand the reasoning behind CareerCast’s belief. Newspapers are mere inches away from becoming extinct. Martin Baron, the executive editor of the Washington Post, delivered the 2015 Hayes Press-Enterprise Lecture last week and he rightly said the end is coming.
“We can start by discarding the lingering notion that paper will remain for long a big part of what we do. It will not. For a while, yes, but it will not last,” he admitted. “The newspaper remains, as of today, a predominant source of revenue for organizations like (The Washington Post) but the revenue it produces is declining sharply. Advertisers are leaving. Most readers prefer to get their information from digital sources.”
Based on my email’s inbox, readership on the internet is galloping but print newspapers, magazines, and hardback books are in grave straits. This digital age we live in can deliver a high-definition full-length movie is a matter of seconds. iPads, laptops, iPhones and the like can access the answer to any question in a fraction of the time it takes to look through a newspaper and never forget the internet is absolutely free.
That said, I have firmly believe I have had more fun as a newsman than 98 percent of others have experienced, be it in the chicken processing plants, the plumbers’ trucks, the asphalt business or whatever else is out there. Sure, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, but I have marveled at the number of emails I get every day from far-away places.
The big search engines like Google and Yahoo pick my stories up every day and other web sites feature stories from Chattanoogan.com with great regularity. If you type “Roy Exum” on Google’s search line, it will result in “about 20,200 results in 0.21 seconds.” If I am trying to find a story I once wrote, I’ve seen the count exceed 400,000 results. There is no way a newspaper can compare or compete with that.
I still love print newspapers. I read three every day but I know they are not going to be part of our lives in the not-so-distant future.
Here’s some other stuff I need to mention:
FOUR LSU STUDENTS were going through Mobile, Ala., last week on their way to the Florida seashore and spring vacation when they got pulled over for expired tags on the trailer they were pulling. The cops wanted to know what they were hauling and, rather reluctantly, the underage boys opened the trailer’s door. The police were amazed as they counted 1,908 cans of Natural Light beer, 60 bottles of Corona, five liters of wine and eight bottles of rum, tequila and whiskey. Don’t worry … nothing the Mobile courts can do will be worse than what their fraternity brothers will think up when they are high and dry in Florida.
POLICE IN CLEVELAND, OHIO have arrested the mother of the two-year-old who held her baby over a railing of a cheetah exhibit at the zoo and lost her grip. The infants’ parents leapt over the rail to successfully rescue the child but reckless endangerment charges have been filed, despite the fact the cheetahs were pretty bored watching human beings acting crazy.
AN ALABAMA MAN had a two-year online relationship with a woman in Oregon and finally drove all the way across the United States to live with his love. When she took him to her house, she said she had a special surprise, seated him at an outside table and told him to close his eyes. That was when she hit him in the head with a baseball bat, fracturing his skull. She told police she changed her mind about being his girlfriend and the police told her she was being booked on first degree assault.
LARRY McELROY SAW an armadillo in his yard in Lee County, Georgia, jacked a cartridge into his 9 mm pistol and shot the critter. But the bullet ricocheted off the armored animal, hit a fence and then slammed through the door of a mobile home where it finally lodged in the back of his mother-in-law. Latest reports say Carol Johnson, age 74, is healing but whether she’s speaking to Larry is anybody’s guess.
I AM STILL LAUGHING about the baseball game between the Yankees and Red Sox that went 19 innings and took nearly seven hours to play before Boston won, 6-5. Mark Teixeira, who had a homer for the Yankees, was 34 years old when the game started and 35 when it finished in the early-morning hours of his birthday but the best line came from announcer Bob Costas who said during one late-inning lull, “Did you know it is illegal to own just one guinea pig in Switzerland? The things get lonesome…” Costas later said he got the tidbit of wisdom from a Snapple bottle.
royexum@aol.com