Announcement for Legal Reasons
I’ve had this conversation a lot in private lately, so I suppose it’s public time now. After my last newsletter (in January!! Forgive me!!) about my grandfather's legal career, about six different people reached out to me and asked me if I’d ever thought about becoming a lawyer. My mom in particular told me about how when she was in her early 40s, with two small kids, she retrained as a teacher (after being a news copyeditor, small aircraft pilot, and about a dozen other things), and said it’s a good time in one’s life to pivot. In adulthood, I am once again forced to marvel at her flexibility and resilience. A few years ago she said she was considering going back to school to get a master's degree in Canada, and said “I’ll be [X years old] by the time I’m done!” I told her she’d be [X years old] either way, in the sort of ruthlessly direct manner I typically employ. That seemed to clinch it for her, and off she went to Canada for a few years. I suppose we’ve taken turns telling each other to go do something rambunctious here and there.
I've been out of formal salaried employment for about a year now and I have really needed to find a steady job. I have applied to lots (lots, lots, lots) of things. It's been hard. I know I’ve lamented the collapse of journalism as an industry here before. The situation has only gotten worse – I was just browsing and saw that more than 600 writers have lost their jobs so far in 2024 – across all of the digital-first outlets that would normally be interested in hiring someone like me. Even legacy publications like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated have been gutted. Ads are popping up for an “AI-assisted reporter,” which is about the bleakest thing I can imagine. Audiences are just as desperate as always for good quality information, but now go towards influencers and podcasters more than print. It’s all personalities rather than institutions.
So I had a choice – I could either go the independent route, or turn towards the UK print media establishment.
Both options were unappealing for different reasons. As a “content creator” I would have to start producing podcasts and videos of my real human voice/face at a spectacular rate. As is completely obvious to my regular readers, I already struggle to put out a weekly column. Daily videos are not a realistic ask. The vast majority of my work comprises features, not breaking updates.
As for the other route, that I felt was slightly more doable. But there were still some obstacles that put me off. First off, there's no way I'm getting an establishment job without a qualification of some sort, either an NCTJ or a Masters', and both of those felt a little silly since I've been working as a journalist since 2009. I might have been able to swallow that, but the real pressure here is that I'd need to fully fully fully commit to the job. The best journos, the ones that get recognition and get the good jobs – they're on the clock 24/7. Zero life outside the bubble of the journalism world. Constantly making time for sources, digging up scoops, haggling with editors. That's my competition and I just don't want a life like that. I want something a little more well-rounded.
But. Also. Most importantly. I have done a lot of things in journalism, and looking out beyond what's available, I couldn't think of anything I really wanted to do, beyond what I'm already writing in the Kitchen. The kinds of professional challenges I see now just don't compel me. I've published two books, I wrote a weekly travel column for a paper, I did investigations and some big-shot editing. I've had a cool and lucky career. I feel like I've achieved a lot and I'm really proud of all of it. And now I just want to publish my little interviews or recipes or essays and not worry about whether it makes any money. I need something new.
In the background of all this, I’ve been doing quite a lot of volunteering for a tech union since I left my tech job last spring.
(Yes, tech has unions. I got really interested a few years ago in this and covered it at my last job. Tech jobs aren’t thought of as union jobs at all for any number of reasons – it’s not sweaty manual labor, they’re all well-paid, workers are so in demand that they can basically take their pick of the market, tech offices are full of beanbag chairs and arcade games, etc. None of this was never entirely true – it may have been true for the top 2% of fancy engineers, but the rest of the workforce still faced adverse conditions – and anyone who’s tried to apply for a tech job in the last few years knows it’s even less true now.)
Anyways. I’ve mostly been helping people in workplace disputes. For obvious reasons I’m not at liberty to provide any details here, but I have really enjoyed helping people with legally-flavored problems. People really, really appreciate having an advocate on their side when they're in a bind. Each time I run into a new situation, I have to go check employment law and look up old cases to see how specific conflicts shake out, and I've unfortunately discovered that learning this stuff is fun. I have also, not surprisingly, enjoyed all of the arguing with bad bosses or frustrating HR reps. I love arguing.
“This is a real sort of job that exists in the world,” I realized. “It would be nice to get paid for it.”
So, thanks to the support of my family, I’ll be heading to law school here in London in the fall. Astonishingly in the UK the law degree is an undergraduate thing, so I just need to take a one-year “conversion” course to change my BA in philosophy into a qualifying law degree. (And it's way, way cheaper than a three-year law school in the states.) After that comes some form of (paid!) vocational training as either a solicitor or barrister, which is another distinction the US lacks that deserves its own post at a later date. [NO, I WILL NOT BE WEARING THE WIG. That's just for criminal trials and I have no interest in being a criminal lawyer.]
(I do understand that law is not traditionally the sort of job where people have a really chill work-life balance and that this contradicts the "I'd love a well-rounded life" comment I just made. But at least in this case, I'll be paid much better for my time.)
I plan to continue this newsletter indefinitely with the aim of weekly-ish posts. Please forgive me for any interruptions in service. The gap in coverage for the past few months was partially due to applying to school/going to visit dad and kel and eliot in Maine/going to Berlin with Rachel/getting a horrible respiratory infection that I’m still recovering from/moving furniture/general ADHD brain dysfunction. Your regularly scheduled Ernie's Kitchen posts will now resume.