Jill Porter: It was a 34-year dream, and you were in it, always
EVERY SUMMER when I'm on vacation, I have the same dream: It's 2 o'clock in the afternoon on my deadline day and I'm frantic because I have nothing to write about.
EVERY SUMMER when I'm on vacation, I have the same dream:
It's 2 o'clock in the afternoon on my deadline day and I'm frantic because I have nothing to write about.
I bolt out of sleep, my stomach a pit of dread.
I'm relieved when I groggily realize it's just a dream. Until I go back to work, that is.
Because every Tuesday and Thursday, on the days I write my column, I awake to face another deadline with a vague sense of doom.
During 30 years of writing the column, it never changed.
I suspect I'll have the same dream for the rest of my life: persistent stress etches grooves in your brain that remain long after circumstances change.
And in my case, circumstances are about to change.
After 34 years, I'm leaving the Daily News. Yesterday was my last day.
No, it has nothing to do with fear that the Daily News might close.
Certainly there's a popular assumption that if CEO Brian Tierney loses control of the company to our creditors in bankruptcy court, they'll shut the paper down.
They've apparently said as much.
And we recently placed No. 1 on a blogger's top-10 list of daily newspapers that might soon fold.
So far, the staff has coped with our usual equanimity: there's been only one suicide, two drug overdoses and seven psychiatric hospitalizations.
It made for a great story and a witty headline.
If you missed the story - it's because I'm making it up.
The truth is, we're used to impending doom at the Daily News. Our demise has been a waxing and waning rumor forever; it has made us who we are.
True, we've never actually been in bankruptcy before.
But if you think the staff is demoralized, paralyzed and depressed, you're wrong.
Sure, there's private anguish and worry about our jobs in an industry that's lost its footing in the Internet revolution.
But from my office, I hear the same thing I've heard for 34 years: the soothing hum of camaraderie, cascades of laughter and currents of amiable chatter.
And I see the same thing I've seen for 34 years: the intense concentration of reporters and editors at work, summoning the same energy and focus as always, adding spark and wit to routine news or pursuing groundbreaking enterprise stories.
Killing the Daily News is unthinkable, perhaps not even possible.
Because the will to survive has become an incarnate life force that seems to have made the Daily News indestructible.
I'll miss my colleagues desperately.
I'll miss my, um, fans - like the NRA guy who warned in an e-mail this week that my "crazy liberal views. . . are going to move us right past socialism and into communism."
I'll miss the callers who get right to the point, with sentiments such as: "You're a moron."
I'll miss my e-mail buddies who believe that the way to facilitate a lively dialogue over an issue is to start off by calling me a "stupid piece of s----."
Of course, some of you were devoted readers, despite occasional differences of opinion, and were generous with your praise. You'll never know how much I appreciated every word.
Mostly, I'll miss the teary tales I heard from suffering souls with nowhere left to turn but the press; I'll miss the stories of triumph and survival that inspire me; I'll miss the intimate chats inside homes all over the city.
I'll miss the chance to make something right for a victim of injustice; the chance to rail against misguided public policy with the hope of changing it; the chance to make you laugh, cry, think, rage or send a donation and an offer of prayer to a struggling stranger.
I'll miss all of it.
I came to the Daily News in 1975.
A few months earlier, I'd come home to my job at The Trentonian, in Trenton after spending a summer in California.
The minute I walked into the newsroom, I quit.
I had to get back to the West Coast.
While I was figuring out how to do that with $200 and a Volkswagen, I was offered a job here.
After a brief period of consideration, I took it.
I figured I'd work at the Daily News long enough to save the money I needed to get back to California and support myself until I got a newspaper job there.
That was 34 years ago.
And now that the Daily News has repossessed the company car, a benefit I had for 30 years - I have $200 and NO Volks-wagen.
What I have, instead, is the gift of having worked at the greatest job with the greatest colleagues for all these wonderful years.
It's been a privilege that far outweighed all those terrible dreams about deadline. *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: