It’s not a large article, but to me it’s significant. The Career Journal section of today’s Wall Street Journal features “Professional Organizer” as the career it examines in its Pay Grade column.
It lists hours, benefits, best part of the job, worst part of the job, and similar info, based on interviews with several professional organizers. The online version of the article has a slide show with photos of some organizers as well as some before and after shots.
Why do I think it’s significant? To me it legitimizes our profession (though it’s certainly not the first time that POs have been mentioned in the Journal). I’m still surprised that I occasionally encounter people who don’t know that organizing is a viable profession — despite NAPO being two decades old and boasting 4200 members.
There are still those who have a real or virtual smirk when mentioning our profession (the judicious use of quotation marks around “professional organizer” that was used in popular blogger Merlin Mann’s recent 43 folders blog entry and the ire it whipped up in the comments comes to mind). When an august business-oriented newspaper like the Wall Street Journal treats organizing as a career option like any other, I think that’s progress.
Tagged with: napo, press, wall street journal
I find that it takes the various publications “of record” a couple years to write about trends or whatever that people in the trenches have known about for at least 2 years.
That’s why … HINT TO FELLOW WRITERS ... stories that you do now for trade publications, make great pitches to mainstream ones down the road.
Roxanne May 28, 2008 12:02 PM