Laid Off: Associate Editor at Outside Magazine
"I remember most of my professors were pretty frank with us about the fact that there’s not really any job stability in journalism."
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In today’s issue, I talk to
, a former associate editor at Outside Magazine, about graduating into a broken industry and staying anyway.
Isabella Rosario graduated into a pandemic and a gutted media industry. She knew journalism was unstable — many people, including her professors, warned her of the risks, but she did it anyway.
A few years out of college, she’d made it to Outside Magazine as an Associate Editor, juggling columns, the twice-weekly Bodywork newsletter, and a photo essay section. She also oversaw the magazine’s freelance fact-checking process. On February 6th of this year, she was laid off, along with most of the editors she worked with daily. Twenty people were cut total.
A week later, mass federal layoffs hit. Friends working in nonprofits and public schools started bracing for cuts. The chaos wasn’t just in media, it was everywhere. “How does one try to forge a career in this environment?” she asks. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”
In this issue, Isabella talks about what it’s like to build a career in a field that’s always been precarious, why she’s still rooting for journalism, and who she hopes the industry makes room for.
“There’s an understandable impulse among media workers to tell young people not to go into journalism because of the low pay and instability,” she said. “But while I think we should be honest about the realities of this industry, I don’t want it to be exclusively for people who attended boarding school. My two cents for any young, aspiring journalists out there is that if you really want this, you should go for it. Expect to get laid off and have a plan for when it happens. Your unique perspective matters.”
How did they handle layoffs?
That morning, I received a 15-minute Google Meet invitation from someone in HR, which immediately set off my alarm bells. But I tried to convince myself that they just wanted to check in about a family illness I had recently discussed with my manager. My boyfriend was home at the time, and so I was talking this through with him right up until a few minutes before the meeting started. At T-minus one minute, I searched “layoff” in the company Slack and saw people discussing team reductions, so there was my confirmation. As the HR representative informed me that my position was being terminated, my boyfriend held my hand off-screen. And then as soon as the call ended, my company-issued laptop powered off and I was locked out of my work email.
You mentioned that mass federal layoffs happened right after you were laid off. What is it like to see thousands of people lose their job when you're on the job hunt?
Losing a job is personally devastating, but it takes on a new valence when so many other people are losing their jobs — particularly ones that were once thought of as stable. Our country is worse off with less people stewarding our national parks, conducting cancer research, and auditing corporations. It’s just really sad.
You said you've known the media industry is volatile since college, where you studied journalism. Did professors talk about layoffs and other aspects of the industry with students?
Yes, I remember most of my professors were pretty frank with us about the fact that there’s not really any job stability in journalism. They always said that the skills we learned in j-school — storytelling, multimedia production, research and analysis, etc. — are transferrable to plenty of non-media jobs, which is true. I’ve always had the mindset that if push came to shove, I’d pivot to marketing or public relations. But I was never very proactive in thinking about what that may look like, because it stressed me out.
Did you and your friends in college talk about layoffs in school? What were your expectations going into the workforce after graduation?
Absolutely, in a nihilistic kind of, “lol we’re absolutely gonna get laid off at some point” way. I think it’s easy to be blasé about that sort of thing when you’re 21-years-old. The only other expectation I had going into the workforce was that I was not going to make a lot of money. I was making less than the median per capita income in Iowa, which is around $39,000, before I started working at Outside.
Has your experience made you reflect on the type of career you want? Do you feel any industries are safer than others with regards to layoffs and job security?
For better or worse, journalism is what comes most naturally to me, and I was lucky to gain five years of work experience in it before my first layoff. I’d love to keep honing my skills as an editor while getting to live in a part of the country that’s underrepresented in national media, but that’s feeling more and more like a pipe dream. It’s hard to know what to pivot to at a time when PR and agency work is also experiencing upheavals.
Wherever I land, I hope to continue telling people’s stories. I value job security much more now than I did in my early twenties, but it doesn’t feel like that really exists anymore. A few years ago, people used to troll out-of-work journalists by saying, “learn to code,” but now that the tech industry has seen its fair share of layoffs, that insult has been defanged. I think there’s been a paradigm shift where most working people don’t expect job stability anymore, regardless of the industry they’re in.
Not to age myself, but when I was in journalism school, Twitter was this new and exciting social media tool to test out. My media studies professor made us create accounts and follow ten people. How are professors instructing journalism students to consume media these days? Is Twitter/X still viewed as a journalistic tool?
Since Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter/X in late 2022, it seems like media organizations writ large have pulled back from it or focused more on other platforms. I don’t know any students in journalism school right now, but when I was in college, I remember we had a whole unit on live-tweeting. Now that Twitter’s user base has declined, I see fewer journalists putting out calls for sources on there. That’s probably for the best — the site was never very representative of the average person.
A live tweeting course? That was the main focus? What other courses did you or your peers take that felt very “of the time” with regards to the internet/social media?
I don't think it was a course, just part of a unit in Introduction to Multimedia Storytelling, if I remember correctly. That was a sophomore year class, so it would've been 2017. I've been wracking my brain trying to remember another "of the time" thing and I remembered how one of my professors really loved parallax scrolling and how it was used in the 2012 New York Times story Snow Fall, and seemed to bring up the "Snow Fall effect" every other class.
Snow Fall was definitely groundbreaking. It won a Pulitzer, after all. But I think the novelty of it was lost on some of us not easily impressed 19-year-olds by 2017.
Do you feel like your self-worth is tied up in your job?
Yes and no. The screenshot of Jemima Kirke’s Instagram story where someone asks her, “An [sic] advice to unconfident young women ?” and she says, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much” changed my brain chemistry. Though my favorite part about it is, if you look at the bottom of the photo, her camera roll is full of selfies. That basically sums up my inner psyche as a recovering neurotic — there’s a push and pull between self-denial and self-obsession. I can’t say I’ve found the balance yet.
Isabella is open to remote freelance and full-time writing and editing opportunities. She also writes the Substack Your Best Midwestern Girl. Reach her via her website or Twitter.
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I’m a writer by vocation, went to journalism school, then ended up working in the News division at Google. Most people would’ve said I was safe and sound and earning more than a “regular” journalism job. My entire team was laid off as soon as Google jumped on the layoff bandwagon (2023). You’re right Isabella, there’s no stability anywhere! Good luck for everything 👊🏻
The best and worst part about journalism is that it's a mission-driven job that attracts mission-driven people. I was at NPR until I was laid off last fall, and the highs were incredibly high while the lows felt incredibly personal. Keep moving forward Isabella, you've got this