My New Gig

I've been coy over the past two weeks, because I didn't want to say too much too early, but my long national nightmare is over as of tonight: I begin my new job tomorrow morning.

I'll be joining a great marketing team on the Practical Law product at Thomson Reuters, and I'm thrilled about all of it: joining a big, smart company with great resources and reach; working on a major product that provides real value to a professional audience; and both using the things I've already learned and learning more about methods and audiences and marketing tools.

Even more interesting, I'm diving right in: there's a big marketing summit for the Legal division of TR on Tuesday and Wednesday, so my first business trip will be on Day Two of the job, which may be a record. (I'm going to Minneapolis, which is where most of this division is headquartered.)

The Practical Law offices are in Manhattan -- Third Ave in the forties, which I'm amused to remember was the big publishing neighborhood back when I started in the business, twenty years ago -- so I'll be back in town all the time now, and might even start showing up more regularly to events there.

Anyway: I've got a great new job at a great division of a great company, which I hope will lead to less grumpiness here than there's been for the past three and a half months of unemployment. It may also lead to fewer posts here, since obviously real work is always the first priority. But we'll all have to see how things shake out: getting back into the commuting habit will probably mean I'll be reading more again.

(And, since I like to track everything, I'm also happy to note that my unemployment time is on a downward slope, though there are very few datapoints. I was out for 20 weeks in 1990-91, 17 weeks in 2007, and now 14 weeks this year. From this, I can project with presidential-election-level confidence that I will next be unemployed for 11 weeks in 2019.)