A year or so ago, I traded e-mails with my fellow time.com blogger Lisa Cullen, of Work in Progress. I don’t remember the original subject, but she asked, in her usual overly modest style, whether there were all that many people you could interest in reading a blog about work, as opposed to, say, politics.
Are you kidding?, I told her. What’s more interesting? We get to blog about TV and work—the two things Americans spend a third of their lives on apiece. Hire somebody to blog about sleep, and time.com would have all 24 hours of the day nailed down.
I have a lot of colleagues at Time who write about weighty, serious, worthy subjects that I do not follow with the intensity that a weighty, serious, worthy person should. Lisa, on the other hand, was always writing about topics that interested me more than what I was writing about myself at Tuned In. Money, family, social conflicts—work is about everything. And Lisa is among too few journalists to cover the subject holistically, with insight, a sense of humor and a broad scope.
If you read Work in Progress, then you know that the media business in general, and Time Inc. in particular, is shedding jobs. Time itself is in the middle of a round of layoffs and buyouts, and Lisa just announced that she has volunteered for a buyout. (I am, thanks for asking, staying. For now. As far as I know. I haven’t checked my e-mail in a few minutes.)
It’s still uncertain whether she’ll keep writing WiP for time.com or not, so keep checking the bookmark. In the meantime, if there’s one writer who’s equipped to build her brand—or whatever they call it these days, I’m not the work-blogger—it’s Lisa. I look forward to seeing her work progress.