Swensen on Progress Life

Daily Progress veteran Eric Swensen, who left in 2002 to cover local government for the Greensboro News & Record, writes this week’s “Vexed in the City” column, their regular feature on “being young and single in the Triad.” His topic: life at the Daily Progress.

I worked for a newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., that often resembled college with a paycheck every two weeks. Many of the reporters were fresh out of college, and we’d generally roll in to work about 10:30 or 11 a.m. and stay until whenever the job was done. Sometimes that was 6:30 p.m., sometimes 10:30 p.m. Not quite an all-nighter but basically the same concept.

Despite making a little more than $20,000 a year, we’d eat out almost every day for lunch and sample nightlife four or five nights a week, having put our reporting skills to work to scope out drink specials around the city.

Nobody becomes a journalist for the money. But it’s amazing that the Daily Progress is as good as it is with wages like that.

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