The Last Word: Those Happy Days at SHRM

During the past few months I’ve been setting up my home office. Not because I need a dedicated room to pen my great American novel or fire off angry letters to the power company, but after nearly three years it was apparent that those boxes of books, plaques and all manner of career collectibles weren’t going to organize themselves.

Understand that journalists are much better at accumulating than purging. We hate to throw stuff away. Thirty years later and I just can’t part with that Wall Street Journal clip about the S&L meltdown. And I’m convinced that a 1976 issue of the long-since defunct Crawdaddy magazine with Henry Winkler on the cover is bound to be a collector’s item someday. Heyyy …

As I dug into the final box, I came across a forgotten piece of work that I didn’t recollect saving. In 2006, about three weeks after I started at Workforce, the staff’s writers and editors descended en masse on Washington, D.C., to cover the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management.

Our task was to produce what’s called a show daily—a 16-page daily magazine recapping the day’s events at SHRM and to preview the next day’s happenings. It was printed overnight and distributed to attendees in front of the convention center.