NBC Ya Later

I had a dream the other night.  Ted Koppel sat me down to tell me that I was making a terrible mistake leaving NBC News.  The shock wasn’t that Koppel had appeared in my dream.  Twenty years ago he hired me right out of college, and I had often turned to him for advice in the early years of my career.  What baffled me was his opinion that I should stay with network news.   This, coming from a journalist who had built a stellar, 40+ year career at ABC News,  only for it to end in a messy, acrimonious divorce.  Wasn’t Ted just as fed up with the state of our industry as I am?

After some thought, I decided that Koppel represented everything good and positive about my career, the part of me that didn’t want to say goodbye to two extraordinary decades chasing news and crafting wonderful stories.  Those years were a gift, and I still have moments of disbelief at my good fortune.   Looking back, I see a pattern that wasn’t obvious to me then.  Moments in my life when people and opportunities collided, pushing my career onto a new trajectory.  All of those course corrections have led me to this point.   So with confidence I was able to tell Dream Koppel that, no, I’m not making a mistake.  This is exactly where I should be.  I didn’t know you could get closure without even being conscious. 

Getting out from under The Man and striking out on my own was always the goal, but I hadn’t planned on leaving him quite so soon.  To be honest, I had no choice.  I had been downsized, like so many of my colleagues.  It’s tough for established television producers, used to big, fat paychecks, to make it in a freelance world littered with college graduates who produce, shoot and edit for pennies (I’ll save my thoughts on the state of news-gathering for another time).    But I was lucky to have developed a new set of skills over the years, the result of another fortunate collision.  This time, of my professional and personal pursuits.

At home, the artist in me was smitten with graphic design software such as Photoshop, while the geek in me couldn’t resist poking under the hood of the internet to try to figure out how it ran.   On weekends, I taught myself HTML, Flash, PHP… and began designing websites for local non-profit organizations.   Around the same time, I had reached a crossroads at NBC.  I was no longer happy at NBC News Productions, where I was producing documentaries for cable outlets.   I had grown frustrated at the subject matter we were commissioned to produce.  Animal Attacks, Car Chases.  When I was asked to produce a conspiracy theory program for the Discovery Channel on the Moon Landing Hoax, I nearly quit.  With the exception of Neil Armstrong, I had interviewed every astronaut to have ever walked on the Moon.

So I took another left turn with my career, and spent three years helping to spearhead the design and architecture of various educational websites for NBC News.   I learned even more about website development — social media, cross-browser compatibility, AJAX, metadata — things that I could immediately apply to the websites I was still building in my spare time.  It went the other way as well – getting my hands dirty coding my own websites made me a more valuable member of the technical team at NBC.   It was the perfect storm.

When the axe finally fell, I was in prime position to form Abbott Media Productions.  I was already inundated with work simply through word-of-mouth.  Now, here I am, wondering if I need to hire more help just as I’m opening my doors.  Once again I am humbled by my fortune.

It’s been an extraordinary journey with network news, and I give a heartfelt thanks to everyone who guided me along the way.  But the sound of that door slamming is also the snap of the clapboard for Act II, Scene I of my life.  The stage is all mine.  As my very talented brother sang at my “retirement” party, “NBC Ya Later!”