We all have friends and family members who feel trapped, undervalued, underutilized, or embarrassed by their jobs. I’ve been there too. So when 24-year-old Kai Nagata wrote a blog post about why he quit his job at CTV in Quebec City, I read with interest, along with thousands of others. Nagata published his post a few days before 62-year-old Claude Adams wrote about getting sacked from CBC News Vancouver, which generated more attention than anything else the veteran freelancer has done online.

While Nagata is a journalist at the beginning of his career, Adams is close to retirement. Their reflections on how broadcast news functions (and dysfunctions) brought a needed dose of introspection in an industry that seems to reward anything but.

Nagata’s youth and cavalier decision drew both praise and criticism. Supporters thought him brave and rightly critical of a long-suffering industry; journalists were some of his most outspoken critics. They variously slammed him for being an arrogant, clueless naïf who personified the worst of Generation Y and should have paid his dues to hold onto a one-in-a-million job he was privileged to have. A longtime Vancouver reporter wrote a column about why she’s too legit to quit because of her strong ties to her community and feelings of obligation towards her readership.

I was fascinated by the journalists’ discussions about the importance of sticking it out and paying one’s dues in order to build a career, as well as their comments about how Nagata should manage his expectations and wake up the business realities of journalism.

It’s true that any line of work requires a degree of compromise or personal sacrifice. But I find the "put up or shut up" attitude troubling, in both journalism and other lines of work. It dismisses dysfunctional workplaces as normal, and condemns people who attempt, however imperfectly, to talk about why they are that way.

Nagata’s last day at CTV was Thursday, July 7. That same day, Claude Adams unwittingly worked his final shift at CBC News Vancouver. Adams mistakenly wrote a dog had died when it actually survived. The freelancer was swiftly terminated the next day from his casual job at the writing desk.

Unlike Nagata, who left CTV after a year, Adams has worked as a journalist for 42 years on five continents. He is a former broadcast journalism instructor and has worked as a freelance videographer, producer, writer, and documentarian since 1994.

Adams has more than paid his dues. But near the end of his career, he found himself in a newsroom working alongside former students, “sweating bricks,” as he describes it.

What’s wrong with an industry that is driving away both young and experienced reporters?

I talked to Adams on the phone from his home in Surrey one week after he was fired. He says poorly managed, under-resourced newsrooms that compete with other outlets to chase the same ambulances contribute to a disturbing lack of self-reflection in the industry. So, too, is the way we’ve come to understand journalism career-building.

“In the last 30 or 40 years, in my experience anyway, part of paying your dues means sublimating your feelings and doing what people tell you to do, even when you know it's not right,” he says. “I think that's wrong.”

Adams hopes the wide and varied reaction to his and Nagata’s stories will lead to necessary soul-searching among members of a journalism industry that’s often self-referential and self-important, but rarely self-critical. “These things are happening across the board, and people are concerned about it,” he says. “That, to me, is a very positive thing.”

I hope so. Journalism is no more special or interesting than other lines of work, perhaps even far less so. But journalists are distinctive in that they have platforms on which to discuss their experiences in public. Let’s use the opportunity to generate discussion of how we can raise standards and make jobs better. We don't have room for more News of the World-style implosions.