It happened to me: I got laid off.

The Real News laid me off, lol.

I’ve known about this for a few weeks, which is to say I’m grateful for a union contract that gives notice & the chance to bargain severance, but boy howdy is it a trip to see your unemployment on the horizon and be rendered mostly useless in the face of it. I’ll land on my feet eventually, and will be moving my move back to LA up by a couple months to give myself enough runway to rebuild my freelance career. Emotionally pretty wrecked, pretty fucking scared, and not entirely certain what’s next. It’s a bad time to lose your job.

I am looking for work in earnest, but to be honest, I’ve been looking for the next step up in my career for months and the job market is inundated with extremely good, well-connected journalists who also can’t get jobs. Rough times to be a journalist in a volatile industry.

I have plenty of thoughts about the state of the news industry and the role that nonprofits play in propping it up while also creating major problems for sustainability. I am not sure that independent reporters and their audiences should rely on solo newsletters in this current information environment, either. But hey, here I am, doing just that (for now, at least). I'll write something longer when the dust settles and I'm back on my feet.

With all that said, however, this isn't the end of my career. I love this work too much and I care too much about the people who trust me with their stories to just set it aside.

This newsletter will likely become the primary place for my labor reporting, alongside the other beats that I've been developing over the last year or so. All my original labor reporting will be published here, if I can’t get it sold to another outlet. I'm also working with a friend to help me redesign portions of it and give it that professional sheen that I'm after.

So please, subscribe to the newsletter for updates on the labor movement here in the US, and if you like what I do and want to make sure I can keep the lights on and my rent paid, please subscribe at one of the tiers I've got set up. No joke, it will keep me and the kitty from finding ourselves on a friend's couch at some point in the future.

Alright that’s it, thanks for your support and solidarity, and I look forward to looking back on this period in my life as the moment shit got really good for me.

Best,

Mel