How a Strip Club Lured a Reporter Away from Journalism

A couple of years back, around the time he was turning 50, Michael Precker was in his prime as a journalist. He'd never imagined himself doing anything else: "I knew in seventh grade I wanted to be a newspaperman."

A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, he was a foreign correspondent for 11 years in the Middle East and wrote feature articles on countless subjects for the Dallas Morning News. One year, the paper nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize.

Now he has a new job: running a strip club. "I feel lucky," he says.

Mr. Precker's career adjustment reflects the recent chaos of the newspaper business. It happened in 2006. Back then the industry was already pretty far along in its path to today's never-ending reports of bankruptcies and layoffs.

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A commercial for the Lodge, the Dallas strip club where Mr. Precker now works.
When the Morning News offered buyouts in 2006, he says the paper's leadership made clear that the reduction in staff wasn't temporary -- or necessarily complete. And maybe the next buyout offer would be less generous. Demand for the long-form journalism he favored was drying up. He could see "storm clouds" all around him.

"It seemed pretty clear that people of my vintage weren't going to get through retirement," says Mr. Precker, now 53 years old.

Around that time he found himself seated at a charity dinner near the owner of a Dallas strip club, Dawn Rizos. Hearing him mention the newspaper industry's travails, she offered him a job. "I like smart people. You could do communications," she told him.

He laughed it off. "I thought, 'I couldn't stoop to something like that,'" he recalls.

Soon afterwards, he was visiting Israel when the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon broke out, and to his surprise he found himself disinterested in covering it. "As much as I loved my job and was proud of what I'd done, I didn't have the urge anymore to run up to the border and explain it all to the American people and then come back and brag about how I'd been shot at," he says.

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Mr. Precker's career change was mentioned earlier this week in a column written by Mr. Helliker.

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02/12/09For him, that experience made it all the harder to ignore the industry's deepening financial travails. In his mind, he says, "the lines on the graph crossed. It got to be more ridiculous to hang on at a newspaper and less ridiculous to take this leap."

Upon returning to Dallas, he called Ms. Rizo, who made the offer contingent on the approval of Mr. Precker's wife of more than two decades. "I talked to her myself and made sure it was okay with her," says Ms. Rizos.

His decision to take the buyout and join the strip club surprised some at the Morning News. "He's probably the last guy anyone would have expected to become the manager of a topless joint," says columnist Steve Blow, a 30-year veteran of the Morning News. "He was a family man, a truth seeker, a serious journalist who covered the Middle East for us and then came back and wrote lifestyle stories about every subject imaginable."

Now he's serving as an all-purpose manager of the 12-year-old establishment, called the Lodge. Mr. Precker's new employer offers upscale food in a plush setting replete with a business center. Last year it won "Best Overall Club" at the Gentlemen's Club Owners Expo in Las Vegas.

"If you disapprove of the entire genre, then they all seem the same," says Mr. Precker. "But at the Lodge, class and elegance and integrity are very important to us." With a laugh, he adds, "Obviously, I have drunk the Kool-Aid."

At the Lodge, Mr. Precker writes speeches for Ms. Rizos as well as advertising copy. He has given the club a new slogan: "For the finer things in life." The old one: "Where a man can be a man."

Ms. Rizos says Mr. Precker combines "great intelligence and writing ability" with a willingness to handle operational duties. This week, for instance, he wrote a press release about the guest appearance of a burlesque star named Tiny Tina. Then he drove to the airport to pick up the 3-foot-9-inch entertainer.

For his part, Mr. Precker takes pride in how the club treats its dancers. He says Ms. Rizos encourages them to go to college, even pays tuition in some cases, and lectures them that, like professional athletes, they need to prepare for a second career.

Mr. Precker says it's a myth that the strip-club industry is immune to recession. But The Lodge is doing all right, he says, and he feels much more secure than he did at the Morning News. "Everybody in newspapers feels like they have a sword hanging over the heads, and are just wondering when it's going to fall," he says.

He says he roots for the newspaper industry and aches for its glory days. But he sums up his job much as he might have described being a reporter in earlier, better times. "I love the work. I love the variety."