Mark Woods: 43 years, thousands of stories, one last column

After 43 years working at newspapers – the last 25 at the Florida Times-Union – this is it for me.

I decided to take a buyout. My last day is Oct. 1. This is my final column.

I wanted to get that news out of the way.

I’ve been known to take a while to get to the point, or in journalism parlance to “bury the lede” – a term that dates back to when copy editors wanted to distinguish between the introductory paragraph that leads readers into a story, and the metal lead used to typeset the pages.

I date back to that. I’ve been doing this long enough that I started my career in the time of lead typesetting, photography darkrooms and tens of millions of newspapers tossed into driveways across America every day.

I delivered a few of those papers as a kid in Wisconsin. I guess if I count my stint as a paperboy, my newspaper career began more than 50 years ago.

I wrote my first story for a daily newspaper on a typewriter. It was an electric typewriter, but still it was a typewriter, not a computer. I was a college student, covering an Indiana high school football game. I remember struggling to put words and sentences on paper, finally finishing that story and typing one more thing, an age-old journalism notation that went back to Civil War correspondents filing dispatches.

– 30 –

No more. The end.

Driving back to my apartment afterward, I remember thinking that story was so bad that it probably was the end for me. Nobody would want me to do that again. Which was fine with me, because I was certain of one thing: I didn’t want to do that for a living.

Growing up, I wanted to be, in order: a baseball player, an astronaut, a photographer.

After hitting about .199 in Little League and struggling in science class, I had given up on the first two. So I was hoping maybe photography would work out for me.

And yet somehow they allowed me to cover another high school game. And the first (and only) job I was offered after college was as a sportswriter. And I ended up working for six newspapers – the Valparaiso (Ind.) Vidette-Messenger, Columbia Missourian, Florida Today, Louisville Courier-Journal, Palm Beach Post and Times-Union – and writing several thousand columns leading to this bittersweet one.

A difficult decision

I’m guessing that people will think this is because of what has happened to newspapers in the last two decades – more than 75 percent of newspaper jobs have vanished, along with thousands of papers – and the uncertainty of what might happen in the future.

At times I do feel like a dinosaur, the Opinionsaurus Rex who somehow avoided the asteroid that wiped out many much smarter and more talented peers.

I’m proud to have been a part of the Times-Union newsroom the last 25 years. In that time – amid staff reductions, the end of the era of the offices and printing press at Riverside Avenue, earlier deadlines, and everything from a pandemic to politicians labeling journalists “the enemy of the people” – my colleagues have done some remarkable work, all while continuing to put out the paper that still lands in my driveway nearly every morning.

I’d be lying if I said the challenging past and uncertain future wasn’t part of a very difficult decision. But, unlike some peers, I’m fortunate that it was my decision. And if this is a breakup after 43 years, it really is largely a case of “it’s not you, it’s me.”

I’ve been saying for a while that I need a change, that I’m tired of trying to muster another column about some politician’s performative grandstanding, that even with a wildly broad range of topics available to me – that’s the beauty of being a local columnist – I feel like I’m repeating myself.

A few years ago I saw something that I thought would make an interesting column. I wondered if anyone at the paper had ever written about it. I looked in our archives and found someone had: me.

Throw in a recent medical scare – I’m OK now, but it reminded me of all the times I’ve said we need to do things while we can – and this feels like the right time.

Thanks for the memories

I’ve made a lot of bad decisions through the years. And I sometimes say my smart friends chose careers other than journalism. But I think two of the best decisions I made were: moving to Jacksonville in 2001 to become sports columnist and two years later giving up that job – my dream job at the time – to become metro columnist.

That was a scary leap for me. But when I took it, I said I looked forward to writing about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It turned out to be that and much more.

I sometimes get asked about my most memorable stories. By this point, I should have a good answer. But I don’t.

Some involved dramatic events. My first weekend at the Times-Union I covered the Daytona 500 where Dale Earnhardt crashed into the wall on the final lap. I went to Shanksville after 9/11, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the Middle East during the Iraq War, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Surfside after the condo collapse.

Some columns I forget right after I file them. Some I think will stick with me forever. Some of the people involved in them come to mind now – but I hesitate to start naming them, knowing I’ll leave out too many.

But speaking of names, I will say I once met Leonard Skinner, the gym teacher whose name led to Lynyrd Skynyrd, at the Westside bar that inspired “Gimme Three Steps.” Is there anything more Jacksonville than that?

There were big local stories, from hurricanes to the JEA sale scandal. But I truly came to appreciate the small stories.

One of my favorite projects involved walking across the largest city in the Lower 48, only with the general framework of a plan, stumbling upon all kinds of interesting people, places and history.

If not for this job – and some columns I’d written about our local parks and natural assets – I wouldn’t have won a fellowship which made it possible for me to spend a year away from the paper, working on what became a book, “Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America’s National Parks.”

I’m grateful to the editors who worked with me and my copy through the years – here at the Times-Union, Chet Fussman, Marilyn Young, Joe Fenton, Mary Kelli Palka and Paul Runnestrand.

All them were part editor, part therapist. Which leads to someone I owe the biggest gratitude. My wife, Toni.

I couldn’t have done a lot of things without her, including this job. She has been like an extra editor, someone I’d run a list of ideas by and ask her which one she would read. (She’d often say she didn’t want to read another story about whatever the big political issue of the day was.) And nobody, not even my editors, has had to share more of my angst about the next deadline.

And then there’s Mia.

It’s hard to believe it has been more than 25 years since Toni went into labor shortly before a Monday Night Football game against the Packers, giving birth to Mia the next day – and my first column about our daughter the next week.

At first, writing about Mia seemed self-indulgent. But I eventually learned that many readers enjoyed those columns. I think people could relate to their own parenting and childhood memories. So I did more. (Although after I published Mia’s letter to Santa – and had her tell me, “That was private!” – I learned that I better first get her approval.)

Along the way, after moving all over the country during my childhood and early adulthood, Jacksonville became home.

I’ve seen this area change, in some ways that aren’t good but in many ways that are. And while there is much to be worried about in the world, I’m optimistic about the future of Jacksonville.

I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had in the last 43 years, from covering pretty much every major sporting event to covering many miles in Northeast Florida.

I did some silly columns, like being Southpaw for a few innings at our baseball park. And I did some serious ones, like spending time at a funeral home during the deadliest stretch of COVID, telling the stories of one day there.

I didn’t become a major league baseball player, but I did get to be an aging bat boy for one minor league game.

I didn’t become an astronaut. But this job did allow me to get close enough to a shuttle launch to feel the sound.

I could go on. But I’ll just say I’m grateful to everyone who was along for this ride – the colleagues, all the people I met while working on thousands of stories, and anyone who ever read one of them.

Thanks for reading

Years ago, I heard about a computer program that measured stories not in words or column inches, but in time – the time it takes someone to read the stories.

This varies from person to person. I have always been a slow writer and reader. But I remember taking one of my columns, putting it into this program and getting a ballpark figure of what it took someone to read it: about 3 minutes.

My initial reaction was: That’s it?

It takes me so long to write something, a human struggle which I want to believe still has value in the age of AI. And it it only takes someone 3 minutes to read it?

But when I thought more about it, my reaction quickly became: Someone might’ve spent 3 whole minutes reading something I wrote? And maybe they even did it again? And some of you have done this again and again for years?

When I think about that, it’s overwhelming.

So I’ll end by saying thank you.

I honestly don’t know what’s next. I don’t think this is retirement. I just know that, at least for the short term, it isn’t another deadline.

After college, I didn’t take a gap year and backpack across Europe. So maybe I’ll take a few gap months, backpack some of America’s parks, pick and choose when to pay attention to the news of the day, and for the first time in 43 years enjoy not having a deadline around the corner.

I guess that just leaves one final thing to add.

–30–

Mark Woods was a Florida Times-Union columnist from 2001 to 2026. He can be reached at (904) 359-4212 and [email protected] until Oct. 1, and after that at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mark Woods: 43 years, thousands of stories, one last column

Reporting by Mark Woods, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union

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This story was originally published September 20, 2026 at 5:06 AM.