TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Nicole Wong, a business reporter at the Boston Globe, volunteered to be laid off from her job so that another journalist could remain at the paper. She’s now looking for work.
In an e-mail to Talking Biz News, Wong states, “One co-worker yesterday jokingly marveled that it hadn’t made Romenesko yet. I told him: I’m not prominent enough!
“Today’s my last day at the Globe. I will be in the office this afternoon to pack up and call sources.”
Wong joined the Globe in 2007. Before that she was in Silicon Valley at the San Jose Mercury News for 5.5 years, most recently as a business and technology reporter covering the computer industry (Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems), tech culture and workplace issues.
Ironically, she was also laid off from the Mercury News. Wong says that finding the Globe job after that experience gives her confidence currently. In 2007, Wong was named one of the top business journalists below the age of 30 by TJFR Group/NewsBios.Â
Wong covered workplace issues and the business and culture of travel, transportation and tourism for the Globe.
On her Facebook page, Wong writes that her decion was based on covering unemployment during the past few years.
She writes, “I was hoping I’d get to be the one who breaks the news to you that I’ve volunteered to be laid off from the Boston Globe in order to save the job of a reporter who has less seniority than me and who has greater needs to stay in the Boston area due to family commitments and other obligations. But who am I kidding? This is a newsroom!
“This wasn’t an easy decision to make. I’ve loved working with all of you, learning from all of you, and having fun alongside all of you. I’ve loved covering the travel beat for the past 1.5 years, and I would have loved to continue reporting on that here for years to come. But I realized — after weeks of talking to worried coworkers and overhearing them fret to whomever happened to be on the phone — that at least it should be less of a hardship for me to find a job since I’m more mobile than my colleagues who have spouses, kids, mortgages, and more. (This is probably the first time I’m relieved to not even have a boyfriend or a house!)
“I know some people will worry that I don’t know what an awful job market I’m jumping into. Rest assured, I know it’s dire. In the hours before I confirmed to the Globe that I still wanted to volunteer for a layoff, I was at a conference watching a senior economist from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and two travel industry researchers explain charts forecasting how much deeper we’ll slide into the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
