Why are you angry today?
Tell us what’s making you upset at your journalism job.
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10,095 Responses to “Why are you angry today?”
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Pages: « 505 … 407 406 405 404 403 [402] 401 400 399 398 397 … 1 » Show All
February 10th, 2009 at 8:42 am
I’m angry because I have more than 15 years of experience but make only about $100 a week more than the 22-year-old interns.
February 10th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I was “laid off” today! Woo-hoo! I feel pretty sure my supervisor hated me and but lacked the performance-related reasons to fire me, so they laid me off. Unless of course, they really are eliminating my position, then all I can say is good luck, because I was doing the work that used be done by three different reporters as it was.
I’m mad because I feel like my asshole boss won by getting the satisfaction of seeing me fired, ahem “laid off.” I had dreamt about the day of telling him I was leaving. But on the other hand, I was never going to quit unless I found a really great job that was really convenient. Now, this is the push I need to do what I’ve thought about doing but never really had the gall to do: move away and/or move into a different field. Being a newspaper reporter is thankless, hard work with long hours, crappy pay and minimal job security. I love writing, but I spent far more time sitting in meetings and waiting for returned phone calls than I ever did writing.
My fat, balding, tool of a boss can stay in that shithole and that can be the best he ever achieves. While for me, it was my first job right out of college. And the place really is a shit hole. The building is falling apart, the city is shrinking rapidly and full of abandoned buildings and crime, and enrollment continues to drop too. I felt like things were run so poorly there and I couldn’t wait to leave. They keep firing people and bringing in new managers — it’s switching seats on the Titanic, it seems. I doubt the paper will exist in five years.
So, thank you for the severance and unemployment benefits, assholes. Now I have time to look for a job that will make me happy, instead of wasting 60 hours a week at the most poorly-run operation ever. And you’d bitch and whine if I tried to use vacation or sick time because I was needed, and now you have three beats that need to be covered for a while, it seems. Good luck.
February 10th, 2009 at 7:58 am
8305: You should be angry because you are wasting your time and money in a journalism class!
I’m angry because as bad as the job was, I still miss it!
February 9th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
AJ # 8032 asked, “When did newsrooms become so passive-aggressive?”
You haven’t been in newspapers very long, have you? ;-)
February 9th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
#8028: Getting rather technical here, but for the benefit of our visually-impaired readers (listeners) I’d post text-to-speech .WAV files that would confound the copy thieves as much as image files would. If you insist that the listener be able to use their own text-to-speech application (I can agree by my own interpretation of the ADA), I would also post a phoneme file of each story that would appear to be binary gibberish to a web crawler but would be pronounceable by Kurzweil Reader and other such apps. When the web crawlers get savvy and learn to transcribe .WAV and phoneme files back to text, I’d start adding insignificant variations in the encoding of proper nouns, giving a slightly different file to each requesting IP address. When my copy with those mispronounced (therefore misspelled) words shows-up in search engines and blogs, I’d start sending all-gibberish files to those IP addresses so they’d get nothing usable from my site. Repeat as necessary. (I’m paid to solve problems, but still no charge.)
February 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I’m angry because I’m sitting in a journalism class full of some of the dumbest people you will ever meet, and one day these same people will be working at and/or running our media.
No wonder our profession is sick.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I am the only person writing for news this week.
The section is 12 pages, copy is due tomorrow, and I haven’t gotten word back from any of my sources yet.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:08 am
I’m angry because I keep getting passed over by promotion by WHITE MEN in their racist, good old boys club.
February 8th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
People are disappearing from various departments in our newsroom, but no official word has gone out on why or how many more of these mysterious layoffs will take place. Everything is hearsay.
When did newsrooms become so passive-aggressive? My God.
February 8th, 2009 at 2:23 am
Sigh…more bad news for open news reporting…can´t we just do our job…
http://gawker.com/5148852/the-sad-life-of-a-white-house-reporter
February 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
After being unemployed for exactly three months, I got a full-time job…….and it has NOTHING to do with journalism:)
I’ll be working at an electronics/home appliance store in my hometown and near my family. I can do it for a year, finish my online MBA and go who knows where afterward……but the important thing……I’m
FINALLY done with journalism and off the sinking
ship:)
I regret entering this line of work!!!
February 7th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
I’m angry I’m expected to cover two events on the same day, at the same time, 20 miles apart. And when I get to the second event, I’m too late to get anything more than a couple of photos. The company that owns the paper I work for just made budget cuts, including to our freelance budget, so instead of spending my time writing the half dozen stories I have on my plate, I’m driving all over the county taking photos of the same event happening in two places.
Oh, and let’s not forget the godawful pay I get for all this work. Three out of the next four weekends I have to work. I’ve only been at this job six months but I’m burned out. I’ve already started sending out resumes for other jobs.
February 7th, 2009 at 12:43 am
#8010
Newspaper articles on websites as images. Uh-huh. Perhaps you have heard of a piece of legislation known as the Americans with Disabilities Act? That’s why you’re not paid to make the decisions.
February 7th, 2009 at 12:22 am
8019, the longest-tenured person at my paper who got shown the door in the layoffs last fall had been there 31 years — and I can assure you she got nothing near a year’s worth of severance. I’d only been there 2 years, and based on the bullshit formula they came up with, mine wasn’t even $500. It’s going to suck no matter what, but at least your coworkers got outplacement help (nope, none of that for us either). The survivors are all waiting to see who’s next, though. What I am long-windedly saying is, it’s happening everywhere, and I’m sorry for all of us.
8012, I think it was, who thinks his or her job performance is fine and finds out the editor disagrees — that was my world too. I don’t think newspaper people are cut out to be management types, period. Promoting a good reporter to an editor spot doesn’t mean they’ll magically become good supervisors. My immediate boss was terrific at near-instant feedback, but the ME and EIC liked to save things up for months and then gang up on me. I ended up in the nut hut for a few days last summer because, already on the precipice of a severe depressive episode, the EIC pushed me over when he said he didn’t “regret hiring me — YET.” Charming, hey?
I am now into my 4th month of unemployment, aside from one steady freelance gig, and I’m finding I don’t really miss it. I’m healthier, physically and mentally, and I have much more freedom in all areas of my life. I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up, but I’ll get it figured out. I don’t know what’s going to be left of the American media when they finish driving away all the people who were both any good and who gave a shit, but it’s not going to be our problem by that point. Get out while you can and go have a life, and preferably a job where you’ll be appreciated and fairly compensated.
February 6th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Sometimes it looks like there is no way out of this for an idiot like me. I hate myself and want to die.
February 6th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I love it when I read stuff like this. Here’s all these 18 to 22 year-olds who have been facebook and twittering their entire lives, who probably never had a traditional relationship with a traditional newspaper going to college to become newspaper reporters. God, it’s so stupid it hurts laughing. I love my j-school and the many professors there, but I still think they should all be shut down because right now they’re fraudulently cashing tuition checks. J-school = larceny.
Please post to refute this point if your school or a school you know of is doing something useful in this area. Maybe I’m too bitter about hating newspapers right now. I’d love a reason to be optimistic.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100253844#commentBlock
February 6th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Re: AJ No. 7988, “The Internship,” which included this absolutely-on-target line:
“It’s just that we’re total whores for money, all the managers here. Every single one of us would suck a dick hard for a million bucks you see, but within reason of course. Know what I mean?”
I always wondered how our ME whiled away the time during those lengthy, closed-door meetings with the publisher!
If I had any contribution at all to how our newspaper is run, I’d have you on the staff today. And you wouldn’t even have to wear a low-cut blouse. Keep the faith, bro.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
This quote from Brian McTavish, a just laid off Kansas City Star Reporter, who was featured on NPR today:
McTavish, a tall man with glasses and an almost boyish energy, admits he’s not quite over the shock of losing his job. Even so, he would think twice before discouraging a young person from going into journalism.
“If it gives you goose bumps when you’re sitting across from somebody, because you’re getting them to tell you what’s really on their mind so you can share that with other people, I’d say go for it,” McTavish says of reporting. “I would not discourage anybody from following their so-called dream. Will your dream turn into a nightmare? Well, so what?”
Yes, I too was once young and naive and gungho about the business. But you want to know what gives me goosebumps nowadays – the fact that I’m pushing 30, don’t have enough money to buy a house (and hearing my parents nag at me about it constantly) and could well be out of a job this time next year.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
#8000 Amen to that. Plan B is a go.
February 6th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I’m angry that professional journalism faces grave peril. I propose a bailout for newspapers that would serve as a bridge until there’s a viable online business model that would support professional reportage.
Congress should pass a tax credit for print or online subscriptions to any newspaper produced within a 50-mile radius of one’s primary residence in order to bolster circulation and ad rates. Moreover, lawmakers should cut the payroll and FICA taxes for newspaper companies in order to make it less expensive to employ reporters, and require that digests of all federal legislation and appropriations be published as legal notices in all newspapers with circulations of 8,000 or more in order to replace lost circulation revenue.