The writer who used to be ...

 I used to write for The Arizona Republic. The Republic was my longest-term employer. I worked there from February 1981 through the middle of January 1997, so pretty much 16 years. 

Being there so long I held a number of positions, most of them behind the scenes. I was a copy editor in the news department, which was responsible for our daily production of international, national, state and local news, for about seven years. I moved to the features copy desk, which was responsible for the daily production of our entertainment and lifestyle coverage. I used to describe copy-editing as "fixing mistakes and writing headlines." Really, it wasn't just fixing mistakes - such as grammar missteps and typographical errors - but also preventing them by asking the right questions to be sure that what the writer meant to say was conveyed accurately to our readers.  

It's not a glamor job. 

By 1990, I got off the copy desk to become a writer for the paper. Eventually, that job became the popular music beat. I covered concerts and conducted interviews, wrote profiles and previews, went to the Grammys and things like that. It was a job for which I had a real passion. I'm sure that people bristled at the opinions I expressed, and that's OK. They were just my opinions, after all, and I got the privilege of sharing them with the largest audience I have ever had. 

The paper downsized in early 1997, and I was let go. Suddenly, I had no platform. I tried to get similar jobs in Phoenix, but no one bit. So I started writing freelance for whatever publications would have me. I did a lot of work for MusicHound, a series of album guides grouped according to genre of the music, but my credits ranged around the industry from something called ITRecruiter.com to Bankrate.com to McMurry Publishing to the Fort McDowell Indian Community, and on and on.

It was during that time that I visited one of my old co-workers at a Republic bureau office, and another old co-worker, surprised to see me there, said, "Say, didn't you used to be Sal Caputo?"

That summed it up for me. I had lost the biggest platform I ever had, and my career was only a shadow of what I had when I was that Sal Caputo. It was too painful anymore to pick up the newspaper because I'd see someone else doing what I used to do and, I confess, I envied them. It's not that I don't exist, but the guy in print who got people pissed off about his reviews and such doesn't anymore. 

That shift was a long time ago. I have moved on, but I kept that "the writer who used to be Sal Caputo" as part of this blog's tagline for many years. I'm thinking I should change it now, but we'll see.