Laid off after 20 years, he asks where he fits

A veteran journalist and early social media influencer says he was laid off just days before marking a decade at a media company, and now finds job listings demanding master’s degrees, TikTok fluency, and US-based location—leaving him struggling to justify dec

He remembers the blue checkmark before it became something you could buy.

Long before Twitter had an app. he was one of its first “influencers.” When Facebook launched pages. he became the first gay journalist to set one up there after Facebook helped him get started—complete with the verified badge that. in his telling. “actually meant something before they started selling them.” He later grew a Facebook page to more than a million followers. and the Library of Congress archived his old blog as an important part of the internet.

For 20 years, he says, he helped build the online journalism ecosystem into what it is today. Then he was laid off—his first unemployment in two decades—and the question that follows him now is brutally simple: where does a person in their 50s fit in a job market shaped by AI. changing media economics. and new hiring signals that don’t look like the work he spent his life doing?.

He says he was laid off after decades in the media business. He started his own site in the early days of blogging in 2004. After 10 years, he sold it to a media company and went to work for them. He stopped focusing on his own social media presence to build the company’s accounts instead. he said the publications needed the awards and recognition more than he did. and he invested in them rather than himself.

His time there ended a few days before he would have hit 10 years.

Now, he describes how quickly the ground shifted around him. Editors. journalists. and professional copywriters. he says. are being laid off weekly. and he has watched LinkedIn fill with professionals on layoff lists. He believes many people may have been replaced by AI programs—systems that. in his view. do not need paid holidays. vacation time. health insurance. or retirement plans.

Age, he suspects, is part of the problem. During the one interview he has landed, he says a person half his age told him that his résumé was impressive. But the follow-up question was, “When do you see yourself retiring?”

He pushed back internally with the only answer he could see: “When will I retire? When I hit the lottery.”

The despair sharpens when he tries to imagine translating 20 years of work into language that passes automated filters. He says he has to justify “20 years’ worth of work in one paragraph” that must impress an AI bot. He also notes a practical complication: he never finished his college degree. That. he says. makes it harder to bypass AI screeners that often reject applicants who “forgot to enter” higher education qualifications.

The job posts he’s seeing are not written in the vocabulary of seasoned media careers. He says many listings require a master’s degree and an active TikTok account even for minimum-wage work pitching influencers to “shill a corporation’s latest product.” In his mind. having thousands of followers across multiple platforms isn’t treated as experience anymore—he’s being graded on whether he has done the latest TikTok dance trend.

He adds another barrier: he moved to Mexico City three years ago. Many remote positions, he says, require candidates to be based in the US. Even though he says his bank account is American and he pays American taxes. companies don’t want the hassle of a cross-border hire. “Now I’m not just older,” he writes, “I’m complicated.”.

He doesn’t describe the problem as a lack of skill or willingness. He says he doesn’t want to retire; he wants to pay his bills. He misses leading teams and being useful in a way that feels immediate.

Until he can find work again. he says he is adjusting—tweaking résumés. rebuilding his social media presence. growing his newsletter. and writing cover letters as carefully as he can while “hoping for the best.” It has been challenging. but he ends with a thin thread of hope: he is hopeful “that my best years aren’t behind me.”.

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