For today’s paid newsletter, we’re rolling out another La Fronde series that’s a little different from our usual fare, and I’m excited to finally put it out into the world. Plus! W Magazine launches its new teen magazine (which I have many thoughts on), why the Russini-Vrabel debacle has women covering the NFL bracing for the season, and more Seen and Heard intel.

Also: The La Fronde universe came correct because I Said What I Said returns this week after a brief Labor Day drought of hot reader takes. Today's take is from one reader who makes the argument that people need to stop telling laid-off journalists to just start their own business.

xoxo,

Stephanie

If you’ve read this newsletter long enough, you already know: this job market is not for the weak. I’ve profiled women who were so fed up with the job market that they gave up the search altogether. But there’s another side to the story — a more hopeful one. Today, I’m launching a series about what happens when you don’t stop looking.

The Way Back is a special multi-part feature where I talk with women who spent several years looking for another media job before landing one. You hear horror stories all the time about people who apply to hundreds of jobs only to hear nothing back from a single company and end up spending months — even years — unemployed. Usually, they either take a break from job searching or start their own business and leave the 9-5 life entirely (and really, who would be motivated to stay in the game when you’re getting ghosted and rejected constantly?). This series captures a different side of the job search journey that doesn’t really get reported: what actually helped women who went through a long and strenuous stretch without a full-time job get an offer, and how they made it through years without a 9-5 and didn’t lose their minds.

It wasn’t until after I reached out to Melayne Cohen for this column that I found out we both worked at National Geographic at the same time. Layoffs happened there all the time, and she was unfortunately impacted in September 2024 after more than 19 years at the company, most recently as an executive director of content planning and system operations. What came next was a two-year job search that was unlike anything she’d seen before in her career. But there is a happy ending to all this: a few weeks ago, she got an offer at NPR, her big break. I talked with Melayne about how she stayed afloat financially and mentally throughout the whole ordeal and what finally worked to get her hired when nothing else did.

I know you were at Nat Geo for 19 years before you left. Can you walk me through what happened?

You need to be on the lookout for signs that the shit is rolling down the hill and you're at the bottom. I had been preparing for years because I saw the way the market was going. I knew that once we got acquired by Disney, consolidation was imminent. And the closer I got to 50, the closer I got to retirement age, which puts a target on your back no matter how much institutional knowledge you have. It didn't matter that I had almost 20 years with the brand. It was a numbers game.

I'm the breadwinner in my family. My husband is a cancer survivor; my son is on the spectrum and was about to head off to college. All of that fed into this plan for covering a rainy day. The rainy day ended up lasting two years, but I was prepared, so that took a lot of stress off me. And because I wasn't panicked, I could be positive.

That makes sense. Did they give you a severance package, and how did you use it?

Yes. I'd been there a long time, so it was a good severance package. I'd already been using every lever possible to save money before the layoff even happened — maxing out my HSA every year, paying down my mortgage with extra payments. I had cash on hand. My HSA had a lot in it, which I used for my son's medical bills. And I'll say this — we had very low to no income, so we were on Medicaid for two years, which people don't necessarily think of immediately, but it was such a relief not to worry about medical coverage, especially with the ACA credits having gone away and everything getting so much more expensive.

Because I'd been saving for so long already, I put all of the severance into my brokerage account, which did very well over the two years. That's my retirement money, but the way I saw it, if that money can grow while I'm out of work, I'm still making money on the side. I also moved some of it into CDs and laddered them so I'd have income coming in from interest.

And because my income was so low during that stretch, I took the opportunity to convert some traditional IRA money into my Roth account — the taxes on that conversion are based on your income, so it was a much cheaper move to make while I had almost nothing coming in. Every single lever, you've got to figure out how you can push and pull them to get out of the rat race and actually enjoy retirement instead of working forever.

Once you left Nat Geo, what did the actual search look like day to day?

At some point you just have to laugh at the process, because it is so ridiculous. I had folders full of bespoke resumes that didn't even make sense anymore, because you're running them through AI so much that you're like, who is this person? So I rewrote my resume a bunch of times by hand. And the cover letters — Workday is the worst thing in the world when you have to maintain 7,000 passwords across individual accounts.

But keeping my morale up meant keeping a sense of humor about it, and helping other people along the way helped me immensely, because when you know you're in it with a bunch of other people who have the same gripes about Workday, it's really great to be in good company. There were a couple of times I thought, "Oh my God, it's me, it's me" — but the goal is not to go to that place you can't get out of. I know I'm smart. I know I have an incredible skill set. I knew I was going to land somewhere eventually. It was about staying in that narrow box to keep on track, to keep from falling into depression.

I have a big network. I've mentored for years and I'm a board member of The WICT (women in television and technology) Network. And my network didn't work. Not because people didn't try — everyone tried. Even human contacts couldn't get my resume to a human, because everything had to go through the ATS. It's the first time in my life my network failed me. Except it's not that they failed. We failed together. I've never seen anything like it in my career.

At what point did you say, ‘alright, I need to change things up,’ and switch your approach? What did actually work in the end?

There were a couple of pivots in this two-year journey.