Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) Read Free

truth to power.
    The way I felt today, I couldn’t do that. Today, I felt I was part of some sort of educational stockyard, moving students toward eventual corporate soul crushing.
    “More than likely the pay will suck, the hours are worse and, in my experience, even the most supportive partner can get sick of what the job demands,” I answered. “And odds are, regardless of how good your grades are, your first job will be at a small-town paper, maybe a weekly, maybe a daily, making minimum wage or a little above, not at the New York Times or the Washington Post .”
    “Oh.” The bright light went out of her face.
    “But don’t listen to me,” I said quickly. “I’m just a bitter old professor, hiding here in academia. What do I know?” I laughed lightly and she smiled uncertainly.
    “It would really be nice to talk to somebody about the reality of the job, I guess, before I make my decision,” she said thoughtfully, pressing her thumbnail against the dimple in her chin. “Somebody who’s been in the trenches, you know?”
    “Yes,” I said. My tie closed in around my throat; I loosened it with my finger. This was my last class and she would hopefully be the last student I would deal with until fall quarter began again. The administration, along with its recent memo on dressing professionally while in class, could go screw itself. I was on my own time now.
    “My mother says I should go into public relations. She says anybody can write a press release.”
    “Well, PR is more than that, and, trust me, not everybody can write a press release.” I finished collecting the newspapers and shoved them into my worn, scratched briefcase. “Truth is, though, you’ll make more money there.”
    The tanned freshman knit her perfectly arched eyebrows together.
    “OK, thanks, Dr. Huffinger. I need to think about this.” She held the iPad close to her young bosom and walked from the classroom.
    Had she —or any of them, for that rate—learned anything this quarter? Who the hell knows? I shook my head and looked again at the stack of newsprint in my briefcase before snapping it shut. I’d collected the papers up during my travels through Europe last summer.
    We’d spent the class period in groups, each one dissecting a particular city’s edition and comparing it to US publications and media policies. As part of their final exam, students had a week to look them over and make a group presentation; each person in the class had a paper due by noon today.
    Teaching wasn’t what I had planned for the second half of my life, but as more and more newspapers closed, my career options narrowed. My reporting credentials—along with ties to the head of the communications department here at Fitzgerald University—got me into academia, first as an adjunct, then as a full-time professor once I finished my doctorate.
    Truth was, I hadn’t been in the trenches for a lot of years, but, like any veteran, the scars were still there: an ex-wife who hated my guts, a son I could only visit at his grave, and a daily AA meeting to keep me on track.
    Today was the last day of final exams; I’d have the weekend to grade papers, close up my apartment and travel, like I did most summers, under the guise of research.
    Last summer was a series of interviews with European editors and journalists to see how their newspapers were coping with political and social changes, so I could bring that information, along with an edition of their newspapers, back to my students.
    I put the information together, along with some lesson plans, as part of a paper I titled “The Changing Face of Journalism Education: Bringing World Media to Students.” The world was shifting every day, but academia still required you to publish or perish.
    The interviews took up just a couple hours of the day. The rest of the time I spent seeing tourist sights alone, catching up with old college buddies who were still lucky enough to have the words “foreign