In the opening scene of my favorite movie, GoodFellas, Ray Liotta’s character Henry Hill says that as far back as he can remember, he’s always wanted to be a gangster.

Some people just know what they want to do and what they want to be – whether that’s a doctor, a soldier, or, in my case, a newspaper writer.

When I was in high school, I would lay out the school newspaper on the computer – shout out to the Royal Review – and after I printed out all the pages on loose 11-by-17 paper, I’d fold them in half and take on the role of paper boy, dropping off stacks across the school.

I won my small school’s phony baloney journalism award at the end-of-the-year ceremony and even wrote game recaps for the school’s athletic website from the sporting events that I played in – a job that landed me a blurb in the Oregonian.

Yes, as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a newspaper writer.

On Wednesday afternoon, I put in my two weeks’ notice.

For the past decade, I’ve been involved in writing for a newspaper. Going from being an intern at the Portland Tribune to freelancer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas, to column writing for the Oregon State student newspaper, a few years in Yuma, Arizona, and now a few years in DeKalb, Illinois. Ten years. More than a third of my life.

I’ve interviewed a woman who watched as her husband died in the middle of the night. I wrote about a blind marathon runner. I went to Wrigley Field to do a story about a man meeting his bone marrow donor for the first time. I’ve won awards, eaten free food, and worked plenty of shifts where I was going home after midnight.

The life of a newspaper reporter, more specifically a sports reporter, is a grueling one. The hours suck because all the sporting events happen at night. The pay sucks because nobody buys newspapers anymore.

In Forbes’ list of the worst professions, newspaper reporter is almost always dead last. Yes, even behind lumberjack. It’s a hell of a thing to see your industry slowly dying off as the main customers for newspapers, an older generation, are also slowly dying off, too.

Although, possibly because I majored in history, I always felt more like a writer than a newspaper reporter. I was a journalist mainly by title. However, that’s not to say that the public’s misconception of what a journalist is – thinking a blogger for Breitbart or a pundit on MSNBC were journalists – and what is a news article and what is a column doesn’t infuriate me.

Working in the industry for a decade has given me a tremendous amount of respect for actual, nose-to-the-grindstone, fourth estate journalists. While President Trump continues to wage war against “the media,” it’s important that no matter who is in political office, we have people that are vigilantly keeping them honest.

Granted, that sort of stuff isn’t something I did. Instead, I covered sports and yeah, it was fun.

But fun doesn’t pay the bills. Not having weekends off and only being able to see your girlfriend once a week isn’t fun.

I decided a while ago that I’d go back to school to get a master’s degree – the hardest part was deciding for what, before settling on marketing and advertising. I knew that I couldn’t do both newspaper writing in DeKalb and go to school full-time in Chicago, so I decided I would walk away from the journalism industry for good, although I may freelance once in a blue moon.

It’s an odd feeling to change careers. It’s one thing to quit your job at Home Depot or as a receptionist at a hotel, but it’s another thing entirely to walk away from what you felt you wanted to do for a living.

Odd feeling or not, my days of being a full-time, bona fide newspaper reporter are numbered. I leave on June 19 and start my orientation for my part-time job at Costco the following day before becoming a student again on August 29. Soon the deadlines and bylines will no longer be there.

I might as well end this essay like a real journalist.

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