Afterwords: Life After Journalism

Journalists know how to end a story. But when the story is their own job in journalism, some struggle to find a clean career kicker.

Journalism is very good at beginnings.

It has mastered the art of the lede, perfected the hook, and developed a sharp sense of what belongs above the fold.

It’s also very good at crafting conclusions. Journalists know how to find that perfect final line. The one that clarifies everything that came before and leaves the reader thinking. 

If they’re lucky, and they really stick the landing, that ending lingers long after.

But when journalists leave journalism, their own endings rarely arrive so poetically packaged. 

There is no style guide, after all, for who you become in your life after journalism.

Stories from more than two dozen former journalists show that departure from the profession can feel like many things. Rest, reinvention, burnout or even betrayal.

But leaving journalism is less commonly talked about as what it most often is: an entirely ordinary part of a professional life cycle.

Spend enough time in a newsroom and you’ll see how departures usually happen. Occasionally there’s a sheet-cake retirement sendoff in the breakroom. More often, someone simply drifts away, their inbox goes silent, and the story goes on. 

Yet, while they’ve left the work, the work rarely leaves them

Sometimes the exit is intentional. Erica Davies is an Atlanta-based former journalist, with stints at outlets including NBC, CBS, Condé Nast and News Corp. She left journalism after seven years because she could not see a future that looked like growth rather than endurance. “I didn’t see any career advancement for myself in broadcast or digital,” she says. Stability, pay, and a different application of her skills drew her elsewhere.

But Cameron’s departure wasn’t only due to individual frustration. It was also structural. “There aren’t enough Black people or people of colour at the top, or even newsrooms in general,” she says. As a result, “issues that are specific to marginalized groups often go underreported.” 

While disillusionment drives some away, others leave because life happens.

Michele Horaney had wanted to be a journalist since fifth grade. She became a reporter, then an editor at newspapers in Illinois and California. It was a childhood dream come true. But then, she left. Not because she fell out of love with journalism, but because geography and marriage made the job untenable. 

“It is devastating to leave your first true love,” she says. “You never get over it.”

Horaney’s grief is specific, and familiar. She missed the impact she had. And she missed the speed at which she could have it. 

What journalism rarely admits is how chemically reinforcing that pace can be. The constant urgency, the daily sense that something matters right now, trains the nervous system as much as the mind. Walking away can feel like withdrawal from a physiological rhythm your body has learned not only to adapt to, but to depend on.

Weaning off that “dopamine drip,” as Sean Elliot calls it, can be harder than expected. Elliot spent 30-years as a photojournalist at a small town newspaper in Connecticut. “Or maybe it was exactly as hard as I thought it would be,” he says. “And that’s why it took me so long to leave.”

Elliot is getting help. “My therapist and I have come up with a strategy of ‘micro-dosing’ journalism. Getting just enough editorial freelance work to give me a fix and ease the withdrawal.”

The dependence on the news drip is strong. When Horaney was in the industry, she found that she even missed holidays. They reminded her of her sense of purpose.

“On Christmas,” she says, “you’d get up, open the presents, eat dinner. And then you had something important to also do. You’d go into the newsroom to put out the paper for the next morning.” People were waiting on you, expecting you, depending on you. 

Decades later, she still feels the absence. “I am bored out of my mind now on holidays,” she says. “And I left newspapers in 1986.”

That boredom isn’t about rest. It’s about relevance. If your work matters, then you matter. Maybe that’s part of what makes so many people stay as long as they do.

Andrea Cardillo spent two decades in television news. A former Executive Producer, she helped to create a cross-section of Canadian mainstream media, having spent time at CBC, CTV, and Global. 

For Cardillo, the pace, the people, the sense of shared purpose weren’t accessories to the job. They were the job. And like many who stay long enough to earn the breakroom sheet-cake under other circumstances, she accepted precarity as part of the bargain. 

“Layoffs are just a part of life when you’re in that world,” she said.

Staying didn’t mean she was unaware of the risks; it meant she normalized them. That is, until the decision was no longer hers to make. Cardillo was laid off from Global News in 2024. Her entire team, in fact. Nobody got cake.

She had survived show cancellations and rounds of layoffs before, and it was painful every time. But this time was different. It was time to move on.

Cardillo now works as an author and communications entrepreneur, coaching others on how to craft stories that news media will notice. 

Ester Venouziou can relate. She was laid off from the Tampa Bay Times in October 2011. “I learned very quickly that there’s life after journalism,” she says. 

Venouziou had worked at several daily newspapers across Florida. Now she runs a small business advocacy organization that encourages people to shop local. “I loved my paper days,” she says. “But I’m doing much better now on all fronts. Financial, mental health, everything.” 

Many former journalists point out how their training doesn’t dissolve when they leave. Journalism teaches people highly transferable skills, like how to synthesize complexity under pressure and how to defend decisions.

Sean Mallen spent more than 30 years as a broadcast reporter, most of that time for Global News, including a stint as their Europe Bureau Chief. He was also a graduate of the then-Ryerson School of Journalism.

In 2015, feeling that he had accomplished everything he had wanted to do over his long career, Mallen took a voluntary buyout in the next “inevitable” round of layoffs. On his departure he reassured his former colleagues, many of whom were not so ready to turn the page, that the skills they had as journalists were valuable. Since then, he says, those colleagues “have uniformly gone on to prosper.”

“Everything I learned in news and storytelling is 100 per cent valuable outside of a newsroom,” echoes Ingrid Bakewell. She was a broadcast newsroom leader for outlets including Global, NBC and CBC. When she left journalism, she teamed up with Cardillo, her friend and colleague at Global. They pooled their combined experience and founded a communications consulting company together, helping others to make their stories compelling.

The challenge, she noted, is learning “to speak a new language and be fearless.” 

And former journalists do indeed learn new languages. They surface in a wide range of post-journalism careers, including communications, policy, tech, education, and advocacy. What surprises many is that their skills are suddenly prized. Their refined sense of judgment, synthesis, and calm under pressure are treated as rare assets rather than as basic assumptions.

Those lessons linger long after. But when experienced journalists leave the profession, they take with them more than technical skills. They carry away hard-earned institutional memory that cannot be substituted by younger, cheaper labor alone. 

They also take with them an embodied understanding of what it costs to pay attention for a living. And some people pay that cost heavily.

 “I loved journalism more than it loved me,” says Chris Macias. “I don’t miss the newsroom brain drain from so much downsizing,” he says. “I don’t miss being in a working environment with such low morale.”

Macias touches on an asymmetry in the industry that many seem to find familiar. Journalism is very good at asking, demanding and extracting from people. But whether what they get is “worth the squeeze,” as Cameron put it, is a constant question both for the story and the people involved.

For some, journalism just doesn’t work out. 

For others, the work worked too well. It sharpened their awareness of their own sense of alignment, and when it changes.

People who leave say they miss the camaraderie. Accomplishing big, messy things together. 

They miss the connection to something bigger than themselves. The sense that the very attention they paid was the most valuable resource a journalist can give. 

Many even miss the terror and the thrill of what each new day may bring.

Because journalism, and journalists, are very good at beginnings.

But every journalist also knows that endings matter just as much. A well-crafted conclusion clarifies everything that came before and leaves people thinking. 

For many journalists, the most impactful period of their life in journalism was the one they typed last.

And it would seem as though that ending lingers long after.

If they’re lucky.