Wendy Parker's Page

After 25 years in newspapers, I’ve had a blast venturing far beyond my comfort zone, re-energizing the passions that I thought had been slipping away. Getting outside an institutional way of thinking and learning has been the best thing I could have done.

But while journalism and media will always be a major focus of what I explore here, lately I’ve been venturing beyond those topics and the work I’ve known all of my adult life.

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The American Journalism Review spoke with a number displaced journalists in a fascinating piece just published entitled "Is There Life After Newspapers?" and discovered that many of them are relatively pleased and fully engaged in new careers and lives. Even as they shake their heads at what's happening to the newspaper industry they left behind.

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Judy Stark, a former homes and gardens editor at the St. Petersburg Times and my classmate from the Poynter Institute's first "Standing Up for Journalism" workshop, has compiled a terrific guide to prepare for the Great Beyond. Here's Part I of her Journalists' Survival Guide on what to do before the ax falls. Part II is devoted to… Continue

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions or "goal-setting" any time of the year but one of my abiding passions is to help fellow mid-career journalists, those of us who come mainly from a print background, to get busy with the Web. Especially in these times. So I've inadvertently come up with a resolution after all.

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In spite of a terrible economy that probably will grow worse, and as the newspaper industry continues to implode, I may have reached something of a tipping point in my evolution beyond the newsroom. One reason is time -- it's been almost four months since I left it. Another is that there are so many of us going through this experience, and we're reaching out to one another.

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