Way to go Marina Shifrin

"Mizzou grad quits job in blaze of glory with viral video"

by

Dugan Arnett

September 30th, 2013

The Kansas City Star

It wasn’t exactly Jerry Maguire’s goldfish-stealing, “Who’s-comin’-with-me?” diatribe, but a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism found her own place in the “Leaving My Job in a Blaze of Glory” pantheon.

Marina Shifrin, an employee of Taiwanese company Next Media Animation, decided to tender her recent resignation in the form of a 1-minute, 45-second dance video, which has since gone viral.

During a surprisingly well-orchestrated one-person dance-fest to Kanye West’s “Gone,” she explains that she spent the past two years sacrificing “my relationships, time and energy for this job,” and that she is, in fact, gone — as in, from the industry.

“I quit,” she says in the video, which had been viewed more than 800,000 times as of Monday afternoon. “I QUIT!”

In a recent blog post, she delves into her reasons for leaving. Though not a traditional journalist — Next Media Animation is known for creating animated satirical news and entertainment stories — she was sick of writing for “clicks,” she says, and felt the overall quality of journalism in general has suffered greatly in recent years.

Instead of focusing on the kind of stories she wanted to tell, she was instead pressured into doing the kind of things the company felt would most attract viewers. She was upset “when someone got to the Miley Cyrus twerking story before I did,” she writes.

She goes on: “I am not saying journalists are monsters, but the atmosphere of today’s society — everything has to be first, loud and sensational — is taking the discretion out of journalism.”

What’s next for Shifrin is anybody’s guess. Though her recent display of brashness and misuse of company property — she apparently filmed her video in her former company’s office, at 4:30 a.m. — might not do her any favors in the old job-search department, her enterprising resignation seems to have captured the attention of the Internet.

As she recently posted on Twitter, “Huffington Post called me a woman. Man, oh man, I feel old.”

And this from 1977 by Johnny Paycheck...Take This Job and Shove It...

And so the young sycophants reply...