The news of my departure is NOT greatly exaggerated. It is true. Yes, I have accepted a generous buyout offer from my company. Here is what I wrote my GM and conveyed to our CEO of Graham Media several weeks ago:
After a lot of consideration and soul searching, I am happily accepting the offer.
I already miss the people I haven’t met and the stories I still want to tell about our wonderful State and its people. I am also incredibly appreciative that my employer thought enough of me to forgo the gold watch and give me something truly generous and useful—a great start to an early retirement. You didn’t have to do it, yet you did. Lots of organizations in our industry are just slashing jobs and salaries in this changing climate. That’s not what happened here. I can only speak for myself—I am being treated well and am excited to travel, sculpt clay, raise orchids, work on screenplays, teach workshops and do whatever the H*** (Heck) I want to do without a pressing deadline.
~End of personal email to bosses.~
Now, here’s what I will NOT miss.
I will not miss standing in the snow and rain. I will not miss crashing, crushing deadlines. I will not miss being on-call during weekends. And I will not miss the commute.
Here is what I will absolutely miss.
I will miss my wonderful coworkers, especially my partner in crime, my producer, Tony. I will miss meeting strangers and telling their interesting stories. I will miss the adrenaline rush of breaking news.
And of course, I will miss... the wonderful Channel 4 audience which has made alllllllll of this so much D*** (Darn) fun.
For the fun of it, I dug up my first headshot for Channel 4 in 1992 and my most recent. A lot of time has passed between those two photos. A lot of wonderful time.
And now it’s time to happily exit stage right in the coming weeks.
Thank you Detroit and Michigan. I love the H*** out of you.
Paula.
---> From our GM: 4 longtime WDIV journalists, others are retiring in July. Here’s why