While we definitely move in different circles, but I thought of some similarities between us after the interview:

• We’re both about the same age.
• We were both laid off at about the same time. Carolla about a year ago from a high paying radio job that he’s turned into the top iTunes podcast, and me from a newspaper job two years ago that I’ve morphed into a freelance writer and editor.
• Stay-at-home dads. He does it with the help of a nanny, but still takes care of his young son and daughter. I’ve enjoyed the past two years watching my daughter, now 5, grow up.
• Working from home. He’s surrounded by expensive cars and owns two homes. I have a 1991 Acura and work in a home office.
• My house needs renovation.

I’m a big fan of Carolla’s, following his work much more in the past few years. One of my first part-time jobs after getting laid off involved driving around to pick up police logs, and I’d listen to his morning radio show while driving. It was a Sacramento station, so the reception wasn’t great, but I’d always hurry back to the car to hear more between stops. I then started listening to his podcast, but stopped after awhile because he seemed to continue ranting about the same topics again and again. He’s still entertaining, and a comic I’ll continue to follow.

It’s great that his career path has done so well, from construction worker to podcast king. He found a niche and is taking it as far as he can. Good advice for anyone changing careers.

Today’s story was on being overqualified for a job and how to deal with it.

I continue writing about career topics for WalletPop, such as a story this week on how more aging workers may be having a “Helen Thomas moment” as the baby boomers age and work past normal retirement age.

My blogging topics, if you’ve lost count, are: personal finance, career, technology, and real estate. I’m also trying to add solar power to the mix.

June 8, 2010, marks two years since I was laid off, and I’m still without a full-time job. It was an anniversary I hoped to avoid, but I keep plugging along with part-time work to help keep a roof over our heads.

Soon after being laid off, I started this blog as Tales of an Unemployed Dad to detail the job hunt while raising a child while my wife returned to work full-time. She still works full-time and we still have health benefits, and our daughter is now 5.

It has been a long two years, probably the most stressful of my life. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned during those two years:

1. After being a freelance journalist for the past two years and enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it, I still think I’d prefer working at a regular day job with set hours and steady income. I enjoy the work I do, but having my income being determined on whether I have a good day and find stories and have sources get back to me makes a nervous start, and end, to every day.
2. I’ve got a new appreciation for the underemployed. I didn’t even know what the term meant until 2008, but now feel like an expert on it. Underemployment describes people who seek full-time work, but can’t find it and must take many part-time jobs to make up the difference. They often work without the benefits, such as health insurance and vacation days, that full-time workers get.
3. Looking for work is a full-time job by itself. I’ve spent hours each day looking for jobs, talking with people, preparing for job interviews and doing other such tasks, all while working 20-30 hours a week and trying to keep a 5-year-old out of trouble.
4. I enjoy writing. This may be the best benefit of the layoff. I was an assistant metro editor at the Contra Costa Times, a daily newspaper in the Bay Area, and had also worked there as a copy editor for years. It had been years since I worked as a reporter, and while I continue doing some editing and working with reporters on story assignments on a freelance basis, I quickly found that it was great to be back writing again.
5. Every day is exciting, but still a struggle. I look forward to the work I do, but the tentativeness of it makes every day stressful. I realize that’s a part of life and that it occurs even with a full-time job, but as I said from the top here, I need some steadiness to keep me sane. I don’t expect any job, whether part-time freelance work or a career at one newspaper, to last a lifetime, but I’d like to find something that I know will be there for me to do a year from now. Maybe that’s a goal I’ll never achieve in this economy, but it’s something I keep looking for.

That’s enough for now. I could probably write for days about what I’ve learned these past two years, and I’ll continue to blog about it, but those are the highlights.

Comment and let me know what you’ve learned from being laid off for a long time. After all, almost half of the unemployed have been without a job for six months or longer, so the numbers of the long-term unemployed are only going to grow.

One of the things I’ve had to unlearn, at least partially, from journalism school is being a generalist.  In college I was taught that as a reporter, it’s best to know a little about a lot of things so that reporting on many issues would be easier. Even with specific beats — city government, prisons, transportation, etc. — everyone was always a general assignment reporter who could jump on any breaking story.

But having a specialty is now popular with the Internet. Everyone has a niche, or is trying to create one. On WalletPop, I write about personal finance, but in an interesting way that has mass appeal. At Housing Watch, I write about new homes and the housing market in general.

They’re niche markets, but my beats are so wide that there are sub-beats within them to cover. For example, for Housing Watch I’m trying to find stories relating to solar power or “green” power. It’s an interest of mine and one I think that I can add a lot to.

Today I had a story about smart meters in California, and a fun story to report on Earth Aid, a site where consumers can get money back in gift cards for using less power or water each month. It’s a niche area I’d like to grow and become more of an expert on, with a host of sources and expertise to write about the solar and green power industries. I’ve already written a few stories on solar power, and plan to do more.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small start, but one I’d like to have lead to a full-time job blogging about such topics for a solar website. Or better yet, to start my own website on solar power.

AaronCrowehttp://s3.amazonaws.com/fiverr.com/attachments/317355/AaronCrowe.mp3?1274479158

Copy and paste the above link into a browser window and listen. Or click the link above and then click on the MP3 file to listen.

I hired a radio announcer to give a 30-second read of my resume and talk about my continued search for work. Take a listen and let me know what you think.

It’s also part of my blogroll below.

President Obama must not have been too happy when he saw a billboard with “I Need a Freakin’ Job” on it when he went to speak about the administration’s efforts in job growth.

INAFJ.org is reminding the president that creating jobs should be the most important goal before the government. I agree. Health care, the war, and everything else should take a back seat to job growth.

I was contacted last week by someone I’ve worked with before to see if I wanted to do some writing for an SEO project the company is doing. I’ve done plenty of Search Engine Optimization writing during my two years of unemployment and underemployment, and was looking forward to writing a handful or so of stories on an interesting topic and making some money.

After agreeing with another editor on a price and being told that I’d be assigned stories in a few days, I looked forward to hearing from yet another editor on what the assignments were. I planned on doing the work early this week and, as always, ready to beat deadline like a rented mule.

But it didn’t come to pass. After waiting all morning for the assignments, I e-mailed the third editor, who told me that I didn’t get the work because so many writers were interested in the job that the editors decided to hold a lottery to see who would be assigned the work.

I was kind of amazed that there are that many freelance writers available and clamoring for work that a lottery had to be held to pick the winning writers. I know unemployment is high and that companies can pick and choose who they want to hire, but leaving my fate to luck seemed like an odd way of doing business.

When I get in the position again to hire writers, a lottery will be the last method I use to pick people. It will be based on skill, and all things being equal, I’ll look into their experience and find the most qualified person for the job.  I don’t want to leave someone’s financial future to chance.

My answer: I don’t. At least not much. The original and continued goal of this blog, which I started shortly after being laid off in June 2008, was to write about being an unemployed dad and what it was like raising my daughter while my wife went back to fulltime work. I wrote about my job search and found that other unemployed people appreciated the honesty and stories I had to tell.

I’ve since changed the subtitle to “Tales of an Underemployed Dad” after finding various freelance work, mostly for AOL’s WalletPop.com blog on personal finance. I’m still looking for fulltime work with benefits, but expect being underemployed is going to be a way of life for awhile.

It was this blog, in fact, that led me to AOL. It’s a story I’ve told here before, but in short: I found a college friend on Facebook, told her of my job hunt, she told her editor, who read my blog and hired me as a freelance writer. I now edit for the site also, and write for a few other AOL sites.

My best advice for getting traffic to your blog: Be sincere and write about what you know best and the readers will come. I do Search Engine Optimization work for AOL and while I could use that in writing posts in this blog, I don’t think that will get me anywhere and prefer to stick with writing about the continued job hunt while underemployed. The site is also meant as a way to showcase my work so potential employers can read it and contact me, as well as public relations executives for stories I do for WalletPop.

As far as getting someone to pay you to blog, and move traffic from your site to theirs, I think that if you can show them what you can do on your blog and then reach out to sites on the same subject, it could lead to some work. But first you’ve got to find a muse, which I’m constantly working on.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a daily list of how writers are getting screwed on pay, but here’s another example of someone trying to pull a fast one on writers. I think it shows how the unemployed, or underemployed, are being preyed upon to write.

It was forwarded to me by my former Contra Costa Times colleague Sara Steffens and can be found on Craigslist. The “publisher” is looking for ghost writers to write a sample for his novel, and he makes work submissions into a sort of contest. The person who wins and will be hired will be paid $1,000 and the four runner ups will each get $250.

The work becomes his property, and since he’s paying for it, that makes some sense. But asking job candidates to write for what is essentially a contest seems like another publisher trying to get job applicants to write his book for him without getting the job.

Here’s the ad:

Ghost Writer Wanted (san rafael)

Job Description
Candidate should be a free-thinking southerner, an experienced writer, with some legal knowledge, adept at dialog, and have the expertise in research skills to accurately portray courtroom procedure. He or she should be able to incorporate the style of the original author, and work closely with him on development. For examples of his writing go to his website (not current, due to illness): http://tralalapublishing.com/

Compensation is liberal – but negotiable, of course.

To Apply
Please submit a résumé and sample of your writing in the form of a character study of no less than 1000 words depicting an honest agnostic senator in conflict with his conscience over his public declaration of faith to achieve his reelection. $1,000 will be awarded to the hired candidate for this study, and $250 to the four runners-up.

Caveat: Any and all work performed by the winning candidate and the runners-up, either in the course of application or for inclusion in the final work, is considered “for hire” work. Any and all intellectual property rights to this “for hire” work, including, but not limited to, copyrights or trademarks, shall become the property of the person or publishing company hiring the writer. Should the writer’s submissions be included in the final work confidentiality as to that contribution shall be required of the writer as a term of employment (thus the term “ghost writer”).

Why do people try to lowball writers? Or get them to work for free?

I was approached this week by an entrepreneur who wanted to hire an editor and writer to blog for his website.  It was in a field I’m very much interested in, but I wasn’t going to do the work for a low price. I offered a fair price, and he countered with half of that. I told him I could write and work as an editor, finding and editing blog entries for him from Bay Area journalists who are well qualified and would have to be paid a living wage.

At least he didn’t throw in the idea of me working for free for exposure in the field, as too many people or businesses are doing to get writers to work for free. As Harlan Ellison explains well in the video above,  the person doing the asking doesn’t work for free, so why should writers?

Forbes magazine, started by a billionaire, is asking for media bloggers to write for it for free and the “exposure” of its readers. What? Who would do that? And why?

Writers deserved to be paid,  just like everybody else. And the people who do it for “exposure” on the Internet should think how they’re undercutting themselves and others by writing for free.

It’s why I couldn’t get the blogging job. I had the gall to ask for twice as much money as the website owner was willing to pay.  I guess if I were just out of college, had no experience and no job, it would be enticing. But I’ve got bills to pay, just like everyone else.