Steelhammer: Making America's news business great again with tronc

These days, I feel as lucky as an EPA official emerging unscathed from a road trip through Logan County in a car plastered with "Hillary" stickers simply to continue having a job as a newspaper reporter. There are not a lot of employment opportunities for the 21st Century's equivalent of the town crier, especially if, like me, you are old, technology challenged and live in a state with an economy that's escaped do-not-resuscitate orders only because its Legislature can't agree on the wording. While Career Cast's 2016 Jobs Rated Report listed newspaper reporter as the worst job in America for the third consecutive year, thanks mainly to a -9 percent projected growth rate, high on-the-job stress and low pay, I still enjoy coming to work. It's a job that's rarely boring, always challenging, and puts me in contact with a cast of characters in an array of settings I would never encounter had I pursued the only other marketable skill I developed during my life -- hay baling. I'm also lucky to be working for a company that still considers its main purpose to be publishing a newspaper, albeit one with video, interactive and online components, and not, as the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing described itself in a press release last week, a "content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels."