She was raised rich on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where she attended private school and vacationed in Europe and Asia. I was raised working class in the Bronx and attended public school. 

 

"Aren't you worried about what they might do to you?" the former colleague asked, alluding to one of my exposés about The Register, which described its editors as "ambitious second stringers."

 

For a minute I was at a loss for words, which doesn't happen very often. My fellow journalism lifer was either passing along a veiled threat from the editors who rode me hard and hung me up wet, or had never seen a commoner get saucy with the lords of the manor before.

"They nearly worked me to death and then laid me off while I was heavily medicated, sleeping 20 hours a day, and fighting for my life," I said, practically spitting the words at her. "And they did it after I won two national awards and three regional awards for them in three years."

"If you thought you were being treated unfairly," she asked, "why didn't you just go somewhere else?"

"I did," I said. "I was interviewing at a ton of places and was all set to become managing editor of one of the Hearst newspapers in Connecticut. Then (Register Publisher) Rick Green found out about it and ripped me a new one. The offer went away the next day."

What I didn't say is that I can do an awful lot to the Register, its Gannett parent company, and the private equity firm whose managing partner served as Gannett's chairman of the board when my job was eliminated in a corporate reorganization which devastated newspapers across the nation in 2014. I can hurt them just by standing up for myself like a man and accurately exposing their unethical and unAmerican behavior, which includes profiting from the destruction of America's free press, its representative democracy and its middle class.

U.S. new organizations and the journalists who staff them have historically championed all three.

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