Life After News

Jason Ball spent thirty years in local television news, working his way up to news director, before he walked away. Life After News is the show he built to talk with other journalists who made the same decision. The weekly podcast, which releases new episodes on Tuesdays, now has 55 episodes and explores the identity crisis, financial recalibration, and unexpected freedom that comes with leaving a newsroom. Ball's guests are not people who failed in journalism and left reluctantly. They are longtime anchors, meteorologists, producers, and news directors who made deliberate choices to do something different, and Ball gets them to talk honestly about what that transition actually looked like. Paul Magers anchored local news in Los Angeles and Minneapolis for decades. Hema Mullur went from anchor to attorney. Bart Feder ran WABC's news operation. These are people with real careers who rebuilt their professional identities from scratch. The conversations run 45 to 60 minutes and cover practical terrain: how to translate journalism skills to other fields, what the financial adjustment looks like when you leave a salary, how the industry's ongoing layoffs have changed the calculus around staying. Ball also addresses burnout and the psychological weight of covering trauma daily for years, which is a subject the industry tends to avoid. The show has built a community around a shared experience that the broader journalism conversation mostly ignores. For working journalists questioning whether to stay, or former journalists figuring out what comes next, it is one of the few places where those questions get honest answers.