Once You Go Flack…Sometimes You Can Go Back?

Thomas Moran returns to the Newark Star-Ledger after leaving 18 months ago for a PR job at New Jersey’s largest utility company. It was stable employment, and he’d entered his third year of pay freezes at the Star-Ledger, but “I knew after a week it wouldn’t work,” he told the New York Times.

He’s back in his old job as political columnist, and freely admits “there is no job security,” but covering New Jersey politics is apparently too great to pass up.

Moran’s editor has apparently been quite understanding and sympathetic:

We had talked a fair amount after he left, and it was clear that if the right shot came along, he would welcome the opportunity to get back in the newsroom. We are missing a lot after last year’s departures, but one of the bigger things we were missing was a political columnist during a very overheated gubernatorial race. Among other things, Tom is a very good reporter, and by having somebody with their antennae up, it’s clear we are going to get stuff we aren’t getting now.

Lesson: The border between PR and journalism isn’t as much of an impenetrable wall as folk would maybe like you to think, as long as you try to make the crossing intelligently.

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