Why are you angry today?
Tell us what’s making you upset at your journalism job.
Anonymity guaranteed. One rule: no real names.
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10,095 Responses to “Why are you angry today?”
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Pages: « 505 … 412 411 410 409 408 [407] 406 405 404 403 402 … 1 » Show All
February 25th, 2009 at 5:27 am
how about a boss who has no vision? no direction! doesn’t know his content? gives out bizzare ideas… calls for a random meeting and rambles on without saying anything do-able. he kills mportant stories and makes you file utter nonsense. hmph. my boss makes me cringe in distaste. makes me want to quit. doesn’t inspire me. makes me wonder why i work for him.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
#8138: Angry journalists angry at trite declarations unite!
February 24th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Angry journalists across the world unite!
February 24th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
i am not angry. just concerned.
February 24th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
how dumb can ur boss get?
can he lose 4 months of ur work…abt 3000 images in all…
can he lose a colleague’s laptop…with images that were to be used in the inaugural edition of a magazine…now gone forever
can it take him 8 months to get you a dvd writer that costs 2000 rupees only…abt 50 dollars
does he lie about it as well…
does he hide ur best images from the editorial and the design team…
does he ask you to stage images…
does he use other people to pass on assignments to you…
does he lose the travel bills you file…
i still can’t figure out why they haven’t fired him yet…everyone including the editor-in-chief is well aware he’s good for absolutely nothing
a man who is incompetent, lies at the drop of a hat…not even qualified to make a cup of tea, keeps getting hammered by everyone for his flawed judgement, gross eating habits, unprofessional attitude, and his love for the bottle
he’s like a bull in a china shop…
February 24th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Of course you can’t help but be angry in this profession. they won’t let you cover stories you want to because it is either too sensitive or too down-market .. yes that’s the term they use. so all the dreams you clung on to in journalism school days about giving voice to the poor and what go for a dip … and you feel caged, muted and stupid.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:55 am
8132, unfortunately I completely agree with you. I come here once a week or so, primarily to (hopefully) see if things are getting better in the industry…but also for you’re stated narcissistic giggle.
I’ve posted before. I’m an ex-photojounalist who saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and left to pursue other venues. I decided that being able to pay my rent and put food on the table, as well as having the odd weekend off were more important than being a ‘noble’ jounalist in a time when 90% of the public doesn’t give a damn.
It seems things are not getting better, not that I really expected they would. It’s a changing world. At a time when massive, powerful unions are going down it’s no stretch to see newsgivers succumb to the new economy.
The giggle part comes in when I read the posts here and fully 98% of the posters are blaming ‘the other guy’. The owners, the editors, the other reporters who are slackers…the excuses go on and on.
So if 98% of you are great, committed, zealous newgatherers, how come the industry is going down the tubes.
This is where the narcissism come in. Take a hard look at all those other ‘losers’ and realize they are just like you…struggling to make ends meet while in an industry that is, unfortunatley going down the tubes.
Then, either get out or do something to make things better. (and I have no idea what…I got out)
But all this incessant whining just gives you ulcers and makes you bitter.
Not a life worth living in my opinion.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:40 am
#8130
Boo hoo hoo.
Why don’t you get your degree, work in the newspaper business for 30 years and then sit around waiting for the axe to fall.
Stop complaining. It’s called work for a reason. Maybe you should just give up and get out now if you can’t handle it.
February 24th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Random thought: Are we all narcissists? My friends and I started coming here in the hope that we could be part of a discussion on saving our profession. That never happened, but we continue to come back and read posts here, probably because misery really does love company.
But is posting here more a comfort-seeking behavior or a sign of our being self-absorbed? I ask because the Times of London interviewed several psychologists who say that users of the top 3 social networks are complete narcissists. I also ask so that I can narcissistically plugmy blog entry on the topic: http://www.news-geek.com/blog
But seriously. What are your thoughts?
February 24th, 2009 at 12:44 am
The family ownership gets to decide what goes where. This used to be a rarity, but that was before we all heard the giant flushing sound of our company going down the drain.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:10 am
I’m angry because at the age of 20, I work as both copy editor and features editor for my college newspaper. I feel tired and burnt out all the time. My passion for writing has turned into an attitude of “just get this shit done so I can finish my homework and go to bed”.
My adviser is a crotchety old man who never has anything good to say about our work. Perhaps that’s from our staff writers who barely seem to able to form coherent thought, much less write anything that’s better than sub-par. I’m in the newsroom all the time, which was once a utility closet. It’s hot and there’s no windows in there. The chairs hurt my back and don’t see my friends or family anymore
To top it all off, the days when we layout the paper, we (me and the EIC) send up staying on campus until 7 a.m.. Even when it’s all finished, I then have to drive the finished work down to our publisher. I pass out and spend my Fridays morning either passed out or completely out of it. I then work on the weekends and start it all over again on Monday.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Why do dumbass secretaries decide not to give their bosses my messages earlier in the day like when I call. So when I call (say the County Constable) back at 4, I’m not told he already left for the day and I didn’t get a chance to give him the message you left for him this morning!
Thanks for screwing me over with my story …
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
To 8120:
You’re assuming the decline in the newspaper business was precipitated by the rise of new technologies. You’re wrong.
Newspapers have not outlived their usefulness and did not need to become anachronisms. People aren’t tired of news, and the Internet has not necessarily been a lethal injection for papers. If you look at web ad revenues, you’ll see they are not the treasure chests many forecasted a decade or more ago. And most of the content people read on the Web comes from organizations that once were just newspapers.
The problem is large media corporations and their ownership of papers. In the days when papers were owned by people in the communities they served, they did just that — they SERVED the information needs of those communities. They covered important things — not centrally directed pablum or “drive-by” events like the most recent reading of Dr. Suess at the library, which anyone with a point-and-shoot camera and an eighth-grade education can cover (and no one wants to read, but it’ll be front-page center above the fold). They wrote stories people wanted to read, and the papers which printed them were rewarded with ad revenues from companies who knew the value of that close connection with their readers
Can you name me a single line of business which has done better when family and local ownership was replaced by large corporate domination? And don’t tell me Wal-Mart, which has turned many downtown areas into collections of empty buildings. Yes, consumers save money, but they do it by purchasing lower-quality products produced in third-world country sweatshops, sold by low-paid employees who work for a company that sends most of its profits to people who don’t live in town. The money they save is more than outweighed by what the community loses overall but the losses are too hard to see.
No, when you see local banks and stores and papers and restaurants taken over by corporations, no one needs to tell you it’s for the worse. You just know it, especially if you grew up in a small town and learned to value doing business with people who know you and your family by your first names because you went to school and church and ballgames together.
And it’s not that the JOURNALISTS don’t know how to produce a profitable product. It’s that newspapers owned by chains cannot service the debts of those acquisitions AND pay profits to shareholders AND pay the staffs they need to cover their communities. So only the last suffers, which becomes a death spiral, because the owners want to milk the cash cow dry and turn it into dogfood as quickly as they can before wrapping themselves in their golden parachutes and leaving someone else to deal with the remains.
I think you should take your comments about buggy whips to Wall Street. See if they’re buying your whole “business model is out of date” theory. They’re not doing too hot, but they don’t care because “they’re too big to fail.” That’s a large load of crap, but there are few real journalists left anymore to point that out.
If you value our society, you should argue that newspapers and journalists are too important to become extinct. Remember the Fourth Estate? Remember covering a story because it’s important and not because it’ll look pretty on the website?
Darwinism has been unjustly thwarted on Wall Street — ironically, the home of many who are grinding good journalism into the dust — and it had no real part to play in the newspaper business, where people who never made much money and did the work mostly because they love it have been sold out by owners who just don’t give a shit. The model is not bad; only the people at the top.
So forgive us, the ones who love the work and what it stands for, if we are angry about its impending demise at the hands of those who never cared about it, and we cling to it a little longer. Maybe we are naive and short-sighted, but the work has rewarded us in ways you’ll never understand. We don’t deserve your contempt or your patronizing “nothing has changed” comments. We’re smart enough to see what’s happening.
We’re just still care too much to let it go without a fight.
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 am
From the “10 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job” site:
“6) You’re always having to ask people to copy you on emails.”
I’ve been asking for three years.
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
To 8120:
Actually, I am in the newspaper business. My paper’s profitability is falling, but it is still profitable in double digits. We laid off a lot of people and are having a hard time because readers complain we don’t put as much news on the Web and in the paper as we used to. Here’s the problem — the company I work for borrowed a lot of money to buy my paper. It is having trouble paying back that money, and that’s the reason for the layoffs.
The problem with newspapers isn’t as simple as being in a dead industry. And people who tell me I should be in the news business instead of the newspaper business don’t get it. I already am in the news business.
The problem is that the advertising business that supports my news business is still much more profitable in the newspaper business. Stop complaining about the journalists and the journalism, 8120, and start asking why people who use the Internet are so cheap. The U.S. is not going to get Tiffany-value news by paying Walmart prices, but that’s what the people who talk about information wanting to be free are suggesting.
You think citizens are going to provide great news? In my municipality, the elected citizens can’t even manage to provide a municipal Web site that is regularly updated.
I can cope with taking my groceries out to the car, bagging them occasionally, pumping my own gas, and doing some other things businesses used to provide many years ago. But I’m not really interested in providing my own news. From what I’ve seen, my neighbors aren’t very interested in providing their own news.
So, 8120, how will the news business make money? (And don’t tell me micropayments, please. Isn’t going to happen.)
February 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
8122: Well said. Way to go.
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
8121, I understand why you feel that way, but the truth is coming out of college now, with the level of debt you have to take on just to pay for you education, I can’t afford to take a job with pay that low. And students now have a lot more debt – and I’m not talking dumb shit like signing up for credit cards we don’t need – I’m talking about just student loans by themselves – that to continue the ‘indentured servant work your way up model’ won’t work any more because even if you’ve got a passion for it you can’t afford to do it. Most of my friends have dropped out, and been sad about it, because you just can’t do it, pay your bills and keep a roof over your head. Especially now when every paper has a wage freeze, assuming you get by a hiring freeze and even land a job. But the maybe your family owns the New York Times, so it’s not a problem for you.
February 21st, 2009 at 10:18 pm
You know, some people just don’t want to know. It’s hard to keep the dream alive when everyone is so greedy and they want to kill for money. People are terrible. But cheer up. The people who research and write do know the truth and that counts in staying alive. think of your self as someone discerning and lucky to be alive. I do.
[email address redacted by moderator]
February 21st, 2009 at 10:15 pm
8117:
What continues to astound me is that wages for “apprentice” reporters have not risen since the 1980s.
What other industry does this to their newest employees? Sure, reporters have to start somewhere and learn the craft. But why are they asked to obtain a college degree and then be paid minimum wages or worse? Is this how journalism attracts the best and brightest by exploiting them? By asking young reporters to take an oath of poverty? It is the surest way to drive the passion for journalism out of the hearts of young reporters.
Times are tight. Newspapers are losing money, going out of business left and right. But it was the business side of newspapers — not the editorial side — that has failed the industry.
February 21st, 2009 at 8:03 pm
8117: If you don’t know why someone would want that job you have absolutely no fucking business being in journalism.
Where did you get your start? The goddamn New York Times???