“You certainly seem to be enjoying your retirement.” I often hear these words from former colleagues, many retired themselves, and heard them again the other day from my longtime gynecologist. Then there was the morning  I read it on the Internet, my author credit for a magazine article published last year: “As reported by retired New York Times writer Diane Nottle.” Sometimes I correct people, sometimes I just smile faintly: do they really think I’m old enough and/or rich enough to be retired?

Let me be clear: I didn’t retire; I wasn’t laid off. I just left. The difference between leaving and retiring is a pension that lands in your account every month. And thus I entered the gap years.

In the Great Newspaper Meltdown of ’08, The Times, where I had been an editor for 20 years, was reducing its newsroom staff by 100 and had a buyout offer on the table. I wasn’t planning to take it, but then one of the managing editors called me into his office to give me a friendly heads-up:  in the shuffle that would follow the buyouts and any possible layoffs, some assigning editors would be returning to the copy desk, and I was likely to be one of them.  What he probably meant to say was: “We’ll need people with specialized skills to fill some holes, and you have those skills.” (Never mind that those skills had atrophied considerably after more than a decade in a different role.) What I heard was: “We think you’re only good enough do the same job you did the first day you walked in the door.” In any case, it would have been a demotion, and yet, as a savvy friend pointed out, with my experience I would be expected to fill in at the higher level whenever needed, without extra compensation or any likelihood of being promoted back up there. So I left.

I already envied my three brothers and the friend I met on the first day of sixth grade, all educators who had retired with full benefits after 30 years’ service, around age 52. At 53, with 20 years at The Times, neither was I old enough nor had I worked there long enough to qualify for even a partial early pension, only the buyout payment, 15 months’ salary. But that was 15 months more than I’d had the last time I left a job without another one waiting. Besides, I remembered being asked when I was about to start my job, “Where do you go from The New York Times?” and answering, “Anywhere  you want.” I was confident that was still true.

One of the first places I went was Eastern Europe, on a three-month rail odyssey. A funny thing happened when I wasn’t paying attention: the American economy crashed. I heard the news upon checking  into a hotel in Graz, Austria, after two media-free weeks in Croatia and Italy. By the time I reached Budapest a week later, I was starting to think, “Maybe this isn’t the best time in history for a woman my age to be unemployed.” But most of the buyout money was still there, not to mention a 401(K) that Vanguard identified as  “significant assets,” so I did the only sensible thing: invested in beaded evening bags.

Three years later, the view is slightly different. The IRS got the last of the buyout money some time ago, despite 46 percent withholding; the “significant assets” aren’t what they used to be. The pensions don’t kick in for three more years, Social Security for five, Medicare for eight – assuming any of those still exist by then. And it’s amazing how many people think I can work for free.

On  the job market, experience seems undesirable if it makes you look expensive, and especially if your resume dates back to 1975. In “The Company Men,” last year’s film about laid-off executives, Chris Cooper’s character is advised to delete anything before 1990 from his resume and to dye his hair – “You look like hell.” Frankly, I’m proud of everything on my resume, dates and all,  and it’s not so many years since I stopped coloring my hair precisely because I had come to admire the lush silver manes I was seeing on so many attractive women of a certain age, namely mine. But my contemporaries and I are living in a world where high-level positions — the ones we were told we might attain someday, if we were  patient and worked very hard — have turned into entry-level jobs for 27-year-olds, who expect their careers to be leaps from peak to peak rather than long uphill climbs.

A new generation has taken over; we are to get out of the way, as fast and graciously and we possibly can. (And really, who wants to work for the brash, arrogant, deeply insecure people we used to be?) But then there’s the matter of the income gap. In the book “Groping Toward Whatever, or, How I Learned to Retire (Sort Of),” Susan Trausch catches up with old friends from The Boston Globe who, like her, took a buyout. The money didn’t last as long as they’d expected, but they’re adapting – some by training in new fields, for the money — and surviving. As we all reinvent ourselves, we are still working, not to keep busy  but, like everyone else, to earn a living.

Yes, I probably should have saved more for my over-50 years, but who saw this recession coming, or the toll it would take on people who thought their jobs were secure until they were at least 65? (In all the government’s halfhearted attempts at economic stimulus, no one seems to have thought of lifting the 10 percent penalty for those forced to dip into their 401(K)’s prematurely.) But then I think of friends who died at 48, or 41 — I’m attending her memorial today — or 37,  and wonder if they wish they’d saved more for retirement. 

Like Edith Piaf, I think, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” least of all these last three years. In that time I have taught in Poland and China; traveled to almost a dozen other countries; published articles about my city in one halfway around the world that I’ve never seen; written hundreds of thousands of words for book projects I couldn’t have conceived back in the newsroom. I have dinner with a friend who did not take the last buyout and was promptly demoted, just as I would have been; now, as she considers applying for the current buyout offer, I give her the same advice I did then: “Jump!” Have I cut back? Do I worry about  where I’ll be a year from now, and how I’ll pay the bills and keep the Manhattan apartment where I’ve been so happy? Of course. But that’s no reason to stop living now.

A while back, in an indulgence not unlike those Hungarian evening bags, I ordered a pair of my favorite French walking shoes. Expensive? Oh, yes. But sturdy and good-looking, too. These shoes will wear for years, and I with them.

My present-day self is very glad she’s not the editor of The Daily Collegian these days. My 19-year-old self would probably be having a field day.

The Collegian is, as my first resume put it, “circulation 16,500, Penn State’s independent student newspaper.” The circulation figure may have changed, but I suspect the paper is still an enterprise run by hard-working, idealistic young people who spend as much time as they can in the Collegian office getting their first taste of what it means to be journalists. In my three years at the university, I majored in Collegian and earned a couple of degrees on the side. So have many fine journalists before me and since.

My relationship with Penn State is complicated. It wasn’t my first choice of college; it wasn’t even on my list. But that’s where I ended up, for a variety of reasons. My parents, who had never had a mortgage, saw no reason to borrow to send a girl to school when my two of my three brothers had done fine at state teachers’ colleges. They would not allow me to take out student loans, explaining that my husband would become responsible for repaying them. (Would that mythical man please identify himself? And maybe send a check?)  One brother had wanted to study journalism at Penn State but didn’t get his wish; our cousin had gone there  and loved it, as have his two children after him. Most important,  Penn State had a powerhouse football team. To my father, whose formal education ended in the eighth grade, that made it a good school. In 1972 he was prouder that Woody Petchel —  star tailback of the Pen Argyl Green Knights,  the team of the hometown high school my father  never attended – was going to Penn State on a football scholarship than he was of a daughter who walked away from high school graduation with a record number of awards.

So I was sent off to Penn State, and made the best of it. After the first year I paid minimal attention to academics;  it’s hard to feel engaged in lecture courses with 400 students. But two Penn State experiences shaped my life: the journalism school’s study-abroad program in Manchester, England, and The Collegian, where I was editor-in-chief for 1974-75. Years later, for a Collegian alumni endorsement, I said: “The Collegian didn’t make me a better journalist. It made me a journalist, period.” I stand by that statement.  

Football? I barely gave it a thought — no mean feat in State College, Pa. In my freshman year, my father bought me a season ticket to home games; I attended one and a half. As editor, I put sports on the front page only under duress, arguing that it didn’t belong there at a time in history when the Vietnam War was ending and Watergate was rocking the very foundations of the country. I must have been a terrible misfit in that culture.

Then why do I find myself so feeling terribly sad about the way Joe Paterno’s career has ended?

Reading about what Paterno’s former assistant, Jerry Sandusky, is accused of doing to children makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that adults in positions of power knew and did next to nothing is almost as bad. I try to imagine how it may have happened. I think of a graduate assistant, an ambitious young man on the lowest rung of the football hierarchy, happening upon a horrific scene and perhaps being too stunned to think straight.  I see him reporting what he saw to Paterno,  the head coach and a campus idol, trusting that the chain of command will do the right thing. I imagine Paterno reporting to university officials and then, thinking he had done his duty, returning to his high-profile, high-pressure world, not giving it another thought. But nothing I imagine can begin to excuse the negligence.

About 10 years ago, I was asked to write a chapter for “The Collegian Chronicles,” a history of Penn State as seen through the lens of The Collegian. As I paged through the volumes of bound editions sent to refresh my memory of my year as editor, what jumped out were two running scandals: the fall of  President Richard Nixon and the impeachment of the United Student Government president, who was acquitted and remained in office. “Oh,” I concluded my chapter, “and I understand there was some football played that year.” (Memo to sports staff: My apologies. I’ve grown up. I now understand that what’s important to people  is news, even if it seems frivolous to me. Maybe you feel the same way about Broadway musicals.)

Last week, in The New York Times, the veteran sports columnist  George Vecsey wrote: “Fact is, we have not seen much evidence of the Joe Paterno we thought we knew: the Ivy Leaguer, the benefactor, the scholar, the man who took on President Richard M. Nixon back in 1973. Nixon, a football fan, stated in 1969 that the winner of the Texas-Arkansas game deserved to be voted national champion, which is how it happened, even though Penn State went undefeated, including a victory in the Orange Bowl. ‘I don’t understand how Richard Nixon could know so much about college football in 1969 and so little about Watergate in 1973,’ Paterno, a Republican, said in June 1973.”

The same might now be said of Paterno. How could he know so much about football and so little about what was going on in his locker rooms? He and Nixon appear to have a few things in common: willful blindness, cover-ups and now status as tragic figures, at least in the eyes of their supporters.

When it comes to the definition of  “tragedy,” I’m a strict constructionist; it’s not a word to throw around, the way it so often is on television newscasts. Tragedy in the classical sense refers not to something bad that happens to people, like a natural disaster or a fatal car crash, but to a drama in which the protagonist, generally someone of nobility or high rank, is brought down by a flaw in his own character. Macbeth’s flaw is ambition; Hamlet’s, indecisiveness. King Lear’s are legion, among them pride, arrogance and an inability to face the fact that his time has passed. Lear’s mistake was in giving up his kingdom too soon; Paterno’s was giving up his too late.

What happened to those children was not a tragedy; it was a crime. The tragedy lay in how it was handled, or not.

How’s this for a sitcom pitch? Old-Lady Print Journalist in a Multiplatform New-Media World!

That’s likely to become the theme of this blog when I travel to Vancouver this winter as a Canwest Global Visiting Professor in the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. (For the official announcement, click here.)

During my 35-year newspaper career, I assumed that when I came to the end of the line,  I could always teach journalism, as I had on the side in the 1980s. But by the time I left The New York Times in 2008, the media landscape had so changed that nobody seemed to want to learn the print-based skills I could teach. (Good thing I had trained in teaching English to speakers of other languages, which has served me well.) Besides, I was moving away from the daily news cycle toward long-form writing, a career shift that has tempted more than one journalist. Meanwhile, the world around me was charging  ahead into Facebook and Twitter and clouds.

I’ve never been much of an early adopter. I was the last kid on my block to own a CD player, then a DVD player, and I intend to be the last to be tethered to any form of cellphone, let alone one that takes pictures, surfs the web and knows what my “friends” ate for breakfast. I prefer to wait until the technology shakes down, along with the prices. The big exceptions have been e-mail, the Internet and my beloved DVR cable box.

Thus I froze when Steve Pratt of CBC Radio, my partner in this Vancouver adventure, sent me his feedback on my first stab at a syllabus. Mine was based on writing assignments that would gradually give way to multimedia projects; Steve was talking about plunging immediately into digital storytelling and metrics. In short, my syllabus would have been fine for a course in journalism as I had been taught it, circa 1975, not as pre-professionals need to learn it today.

Then I started reading one of the books on Steve’s recommended list: “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,” by Lawrence Lessig. “Remix” addresses the transition from what Lessig calls “read only” culture, in which consumers pay their money and experience their media passively,  to “read/write” culture, in which they sample and participate, advancing the dialogue. (Old-timers may be reminded of Marshall McLuhan on “hot” and “cold” media.)   “Remix”  showed me the future – my immediate future – but it also propelled me back into my past.

In January 1995, I was a New York Times Visiting Media Fellow at Duke University’s De Witt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism. The program was an overworked journalist’s dream come true: four weeks on a university campus where we fellows could sit in on any classes we wanted, or none at all if we just wanted to use the time to read, write and think. The only requirement was that we attend a luncheon once a week, and even that was waived for my birthday. But it was strongly suggested that we take advantage of a computer lab that had been set up for our use. You see, there was this new thing called the World Wide Web that seemed likely to be important in the years ahead, and we were encouraged to become familiar with it.

In my free time, I sat down and experimented. I learned how a mouse click could take me on a ride from one page and topic to another, and another, and another. I explored innovations like Hypertext novels, which seemed to be the coming thing: they let the reader determine the order in which the story was told and took her on interesting tangents. It was predicted that reporters would one day file their copy by e-mail, but that sounded farfetched. I returned to The Times an evangelist for this new technology – which sparked little interest among my print-focused colleagues. I was the only one in my department who had a private e-mail account (on CompuServe!) outside The Times’ in-house messaging system, and only a few computers in the newsroom had Windows and Internet access. If I wanted to practice, I had to wait until someone went to lunch.

Fast-forward 17 years. Just think how much the world has changed in that very short time. Not necessarily as I might have expected back then — when was the last time anyone even thought about using Hypertext for a novel? Now we have Google and iTunes and and Flickr and Netflix and Skype, and those are just the icons and bookmarks on my own desktop. CompuServe and countless other forms of technology have come and gone, superseded by newer, sexier ones; AOL, which was just starting out then, is pretty much old hat. Reporters have been filing their stories by e-mail for years (including me; I’ve freelanced for a newspaper in Abu Dhabi for two years without ever having set foot there or even so much as spoken to an editor by phone). Not just their stories, but their video as well. And the readers talk back!

So how about that? I’ve been part of digital culture all along. Hello, everyone, my name is Carlotta Campion, and maybe one of these days Stephen Sondheim will update his lyrics to “I’m Still Here.”  (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google it.) Now here I go again, into yet another growth spurt.

As Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II put it in “The King and I”: “If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” I intend to give my students in Vancouver (and, apparently, one who’ll be joining us via Skype) the benefit of my four decades’ experience: a grounding in the arts; tools and thought patterns that will equip them to produce informed, intelligent coverage; an appreciation for the history of their craft, and its principles that still matter in the present and future. With luck, I may open their worlds and influence some of their lives in the way Philip Radcliffe at the University of Manchester (later a visiting professor at UBC himself) did for me.

In exchange, maybe they can educate me about Facebook and Twitter – for example, why it’s OK for a “friend” (actually a relative) to post on my wall, without my knowledge, a poll inviting people to speculate on my sex life and charitable contributions. Or maybe they’ll teach me something more useful, like how to use these digital tools for self-promotion. And that’s what it’s all about  — isn’t it? – in the Multiplatform New-Media World.

I fly to Vancouver on Jan. 3. Stay tuned.