These days, I feel as lucky as an EPA official emerging unscathed from a road trip through Logan County in a car plastered with "Hillary" stickers simply to continue having a job as a newspaper reporter.
There are not a lot of employment opportunities for the 21st Century's equivalent of the town crier, especially if, like me, you are old, technology challenged and live in a state with an economy that's escaped do-not-resuscitate orders only because its Legislature can't agree on the wording.
While Career Cast's 2016 Jobs Rated Report listed newspaper reporter as the worst job in America for the third consecutive year, thanks mainly to a -9 percent projected growth rate, high on-the-job stress and low pay, I still enjoy coming to work.
It's a job that's rarely boring, always challenging, and puts me in contact with a cast of characters in an array of settings I would never encounter had I pursued the only other marketable skill I developed during my life - hay baling.
I'm also lucky to be working for a company that still considers its main purpose to be publishing a newspaper, albeit one with video, interactive and online components, and not, as the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing described itself in a press release last week, a "content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels."
The company that produces the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant and Orlando Sentinel came up with a new name, as well as a new mission statement, in order to "bring the legacy publishing business into the modern era and leverage innovative technology - from machine learning to artificial intelligence - to create long-term sustainability and vitality."
The company's new name, tronc, a partial acronym for Tribune Online Content, makes use of a deliberate lower-case 't,' for reasons that are unclear, even when the new name appears as the first word in a sentence. At the same time, the press release announcing the name change uses a capital 'C' when referring to tronc as the "Company" on second reference.
The company's odd new name created a stir on newspaper social media sites equivalent to that created by Taylor Swift's breakup with Calvin Harris on celebrity gossip Twitter feeds. Tronc, I mean tronc, was almost universally mocked ("tronc: the sound journalists make just before they barf after reading company memos about "content and monetizing") on newsbiz social media, as was the buzzword-laden press release announcing it.
But from where I sit, staring at a keyboard on which all but eight letters have been obliterated from years of writing features, columns and news accounts instead of producing content, it's hard to wrap by head around the concept that I may have to abandon my imagination and stick to the phrasing, topics and images favored by online readers in order to survive.
According to the press release, tronc plans to spend most of the $114 million in growth capital it raised thanks to its new approach to journalism, to buy "over 100 machine learning and artificial intelligence technology patents for news media application."
Makes me want to monetize my debit card and go out and get tronc.