Why I came back
By Bob Rosenbaum
I first joined The Press Club of Cleveland in the early 1990s, and eventually served two terms as president.
Then
I got lost for a decade in business-to-business publishing, where I got
a couple promotions, learned to use spreadsheets and found myself more
occupied with sales and circulation than journalism.
The Press Club’s membership of big-newsroom journalists and local PR people stopped feeling relevant and I drifted away.
In
early 2009, at the peak of the Great Recession, I lost my job. The
media meltdown was already well under way and I knew I wasn’t going back
to work at a publishing company.
I’m
no entrepreneur, but for the past 11 years I’ve made a living on my own
as a content-focused consultant, marketer and sometime journalist. I
love being self-employed. I’ve got a small handful of steady clients, I
help run the non-profit Heights Observer community media project, and I look for like-minded people to collaborate with for one-time opportunities that come my way.
You
can’t make a living like this without doing some networking, and after
extracting what value I could from the local chamber of commerce, I
rejoined The Press Club in 2017.
I’m
glad I did. No organization has ever put me in the midst of more people
who got to know the world as I did, scratching out quotes in a 4x8
reporter’s notebook.
Many
of our members, of course, are still working in newsrooms or at
communications companies. But more and more, our members also live on
the outskirts of that community. They’re content-driven, media-loving
independents – creating their own place in this industry and, in the
process, helping reinvent it. They’re collaborative, energetic and full
of plans. When I talk to them, they tell me they’re looking for a place
to discuss ideas and create meaningful connections with likeminded
people.
At
a moment when journalism jobs are disappearing and the club isn’t able
to hold in-person events, it’s easy to wonder why The Press Club
matters. It matters to me because it’s a community: the place where I
know I’ll find people who share my background, understand the importance
of journalism in American life, and care about its future.
Bob Rosenbaum runs The MarketFarm. He serves on The Press Club board and was president in 1997-98.