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Back in December, columnist Susan Greene’s sudden resignation from the Denver Post seemed more or less typical of such exits. Editor Greg Moore sent a note to colleagues calling her a “passionate and tough journalist determined to give voice to the little guy,” adding that her 12 years of contributions at the newspaper were appreciated (via Westword). Greene vaguely added, “Sometimes you leave your job, and sometimes your job leaves you. My job left me.” Now that Greene is writing for the Huffington Post, her tone has changed.
“The disconnect between my immediate boss and the real world was never so clear as the day word came that Tim Masters would walk free,” writes Greene, who shared in a Pulitzer nomination in 2008 for Trashing the Truth, which chronicled how innocent people, including Masters, could be jailed. “She rolled her eyes at news of Colorado’s first DNA murder exoneration and remarked something like, ‘Great, so he can just go kill somebody else?'”
Greene, who calls herself a “recovering newspaper writer,” goes on: “Two months after leaving the paper, I’m recovering from the joylessness that’s all too common in daily print journalism. What once made newspapers great—challenging authority, giving voice to the community, being bold—is becoming the exception rather than the rule. The industry has lost its way. In my own experience, staying true to the Denver Post brand required a certain type of Stockholm syndrome.”