Even small-town and suburban dailies were wary of me. I trimmed my salary requirements to half of what I'd earned before. That didn't help, either. The problems that I faced, as I came to understand them, involved questions of management and truth. Journalism has no such clear standard, because its business is truth, and truth is ordinarily measured by consensus, not numbers.
Journalism does make mistakes, everyone in the business agrees.
But when business managers, for example, lose money, they are often fired or demoted. They did not want to hire anyone who could, or might, point a finger at their failure to get the story. The financial pages said that the service economy was booming, and so when I realized that journalism was closed to me, I turned toward new lines of work. I billed myself as an investigator-detective and as an advertising copywriter. There were no takers.