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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December 17th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
With the long delay between entry and posting I thought I better offer my MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.
Oh, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then HAPPY HOLIDAY and HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.
December 16th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
10062, glad you got out when you did. Anyone who cares so little about what others value obviously should in a much more valuable profession.
So how is it down in the sewers?
December 16th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
We have a petty little douchebag who runs our newsroom floor who doesn’t do much other than point out when we need more commas and otherwise try to create more busywork for those of us who want to do good work but can’t because it’s so hard to want to work for a total douche. I wish he could realize that his petty BS means nobody is going to ever go out of their way to do anything for him again, like cover those OT shifts or go extra hard to make deadline when he has no effing idea how to repay favors like that. But I doubt it because he’s just too stoopid to understand how he’s alienating everyone, which makes it even worse.
December 16th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
10050,
I am begging you, please, please, please, get out right now. You’re still a student. Do not go into this field.
Get a job in a field that knows enough to not hand out the entire finished product for free. 99% of all journalists never “make a difference.” A successful career could have, literally, only one instance of making a difference. Do you think Woodward or Bernstein would have amounted to anything if they hadn’t stumbled into success at an early age?
For the love of God, get out. Don’t look back in 20 years and kick yourself for “doing what you love.”
December 16th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
There’s a chart describing expected annual income for various education levels in a document I’m reading for a story. It includes the income for a high school dropout, someone with a diploma, someone with an Associate’s Degree, and someone with a Bachelor’s Degree.
The high school dropout’s annual salary is $22,000. The Bachelor’s Degree holder can expect $50,000.
My starting salary at this job was $22,900. That was before four salary cuts.
Apparently, staying in high school and going to college was a bad move.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Yesterday, my university’s alumni office called to ask for donations. I told them that because the only salary I can earn in my field with the degree I earned is about $30,000 a year, I can’t pay back my student loan … much less give the university more money. I’d rather set fire to it, actually. The poor telemarketer on the other line did not know how to respond.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Tip of the hat to AJ#10062 for ROCKIN the system and STICKIN it to THE MAN! Let’s all party while the ship sinks. Pay no attention to those screams in steerage.
December 16th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hey, #10062:
I totally enjoyed your rant; you were singing my song.
I’ve been out of the biz I loved more than anything else for four years now. While I didn’t reach your point of depravation, I came damn close before moving from California to North Carolina where, dispite awards and more than a decade of experience, no one would let me write for them. They continued to hire fresh grads and barely minimum wages however.
Now, I just finished my most recent final exam. I will take my state RN boards in May. There IS life after journalism. Seek it out and claim it. Your skills are too valuable to relinquish to editors who are also burned out. Other industries are looking for someone like you. Live the Life!
December 16th, 2009 at 9:20 am
#10062: I enjoyed reading your air show tale and I find myself fantasizing on a fairly regular basis what it would be like to start slacking off and watching the repercussions.
December 16th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Today I am angry because I was told to find a new graphic designer for our publication to redesign a few things. The designer our publisher likes charges $75 an hour. I am not kidding. Theoretically, this designer can make more designing a couple of charts a month than I get paid for a 70-hour work week.
I am in the wrong business.
December 16th, 2009 at 9:18 am
I’m reading these posts and thinking how great it would be if we would all quit our jobs and start our own publication together. Ah, a gal can dream.
Signed,
“Julie”
December 16th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Hey 10062:
What do you do for a living? I’d like to make a big salary like that!!
Have a great day!
December 15th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I’m angry because I took a buyout and wish I would’ve stuck it out. I had a choice and I choose poorly, thinking it would best to not have 2 incomes (spouse is reporter) tied to same company. But I was wrong. I miss the newsroom and my journalist friends. I am very lucky that I have a full-time writing job but it’s not in the newspaper/online news industry, and it’s not the same. I should have stayed on the front lines.
December 15th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Is anyone here still wasting money on J School?
December 15th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Why do people buy print editions of Metro newspapers anymore?
Breaking News or the weather? TV took the reins long ago, and Internet squashed it.
It’s not for world or national headlines.
ad-sponsored Yahoo or Google News, CNN, or even Al-Jazeera
Sports?
profitable NFL.com, MLB.com
Financial News?
Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg.com
Celebrity gossip?
TMZ.com
Classifieds?
Craigslist and Ebay
Features? Hah!
Local Features?
There’s likely your free local community paper, that probably does a passable job of biased investigative reporting.
Upcoming Events? Concerts? There’s probably a site for that somewhere, and it’s probably not your paper.
Government announcements? Straight from the government themselves. Maybe even police crime and beat reports in some jurisdictions.
The funnies? Crosswords? Maybe if you need to kill time on the Metro.
What’s left for your paper to cover? Court reporting? School events and Local politics? City Council meetings? Police beats? Chances are you can find blogs for half of these that cover the issues in far more depth, and the value of trained journalistic objectivity is vanishingly small.
It’s clear that the future of local news is hyperlocal, online, with any print edition’s reason for being as an ad delivery vehicle for people who have nothing better to do while waiting. It’s a niche that free community weeklies already fill admirably.
There’s nothing that the management at the Hearsts and Gannetts can do about it. The ads and the subscribers do not pay the labor.
I think the future of journalism is as a labor of love, as it no longer serves as a career upon which the apathetic can rely for life’s necessities. It’s an endeavor that you would do for free, even if you weren’t getting paid, as wordsmiths and artists, purveyors of truth known to be constrained by privacy, copyright, and libel. And if you’re unwilling to starve for your art? You probably shouldn’t be here at all.
December 15th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Hi guys! I’m finally taking all your advice and getting out of journalism while I still can. But don’t think for a second that it’s some kinda noble-noble act. No, I’m getting out of journalism because not a single one of you would hire me. So uh, thanks for the encouragement! Oh. Uh. Thanks for the phone ca — oh. Well. Thanks for nothing, assholes!
December 15th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
10062, I hope you’re not a nice guy. I might briefly feel bad about saying this to someone I’d like personally.
You sound like the shittiest reporter there’s ever been. So you had to cover a no-news air show, and blew it off hanging out with old military guys. So you didn’t care about the air show, or gettig standard quotes? Talk to your new drinking buddies about their own experiences. They probably came to relive those days, and I’m willing to beg some of them had great stories that the public has never heard. They won’t be around forever, you know.
You got away with it then, and for a long time afterward, despite “frantic calls” from your editor, and you’re proud of that? All that proves is that other people – most likely, some who post on this site – had to run around covering for your ass. And the fact that they didn’t push you harder probably just means they knew there was no point. You were a useless piece of shit from day one. As for things like repeated calls to a rape victim, do you really think your boss liked that any better than you did? I’m willing to bet that was necessary because you left three absolutely vital facts out of your first story, and the editor was hoping against hope that the unpleasant task would finally teach you to fuckin’ do it right the first time.
Obviously, though, you’ve never learned to give a shit about anything or anyone except yourself, and that alone is enough to make you utterly unfit for journalism. The rest of us bitch (mostly) because we care, and are frustrated that we can’t make things better.
I’m sure you’ll disregard this with a smug laugh, but I suspect you won’t be laughing long. Whatever you’re doing now, it’s unlikely that your boss will be fooled – or patient – for much longer. You, my boy, are about to slack your way out of a job – anywhere. Then you can lounge around all you like. Remember this when you’re pounding the pavement again soon, dogged by references such as “He was the laziest, most self-centered little turd I ever saw.”
December 15th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I’m angry that I feel somewhat defensive after just reading a couple recent comments here. Yeah, newspapers are swirling the drain, but I’m glad to have survived another year. I love my job and work in a community small enough to enjoy the “crappy” feature stories and I work with people who care. And who work so hard.
I agree that corporate doesn’t always make smart decisions, but as far as the other journalists I’ve met and known, you all make me proud of the work you produce. If you don’t love it anymore, find something you do. No one wants to miserable, right?
December 15th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
When reading this site, I am often reminded of the day I think I finally realized that my future in newspapers was truly over.
I had a weekend assignment to cover an airshow at a local Air Force base. Urged straight to the VIP tents where the various Admiralty and military muck-a-mucks were enjoying themselves, I allowed myself to become feted with free booze, a rare journalistic priviledge. There I was talking with a bunch of guys who had fought wars, managed accomplished careers, had families and honorably served their country. I was spending another Saturday doing something I hated. Though taking overtime and enjoying free beer.
I had to walk up to some folks attending, to get their boilerplate quotes about, “Gee, what a great airshow and God bless America.” Only I could not. I could no longer bring myself to utter the words, “Hi, I’m John Smith, reporter for the Big Metro Suck-and-Blow. Mind if I talk with you a minute?” Those utterances seemed so futile and absurd, like the work itself, that I just headed back to the big drinkin’ tent and tied one on, yucking it up with the local military elite. Somehow I made it home, emailed a few lines to prove I attended but with no live quotes. I then proceeded to ignore the dozen or so phone calls from the frantic weekend editor. I knew they’d get their pointless story stitched together somehow without me.
Lo, they did. I didn’t get fired nor did anyone say a damn thing about it when I came in on Monday. I acted like everything was cool. I had been a pretty good team player up until that assignment, taking a lot of shitty jobs. Just that particular day I was unable to walk up to strangers unaccustomed to dealing with media and 1) pretend to care about whether or not they were enjoying themselves at the local fair and 2) admit in public that I was a stupid newspaper reporter with no hope of a better career.
Sure, there were ealier moments in my career I about stormed out of the newsroom “for the last time.” Like when a known murderer was stalking me. When my boss made me call a rape victim back four times to relive her horror. And, of course, we weren’t going to name her in the newspaper. All those moments and about 1,000 other mostly worthless experiences, along with no future nor wage increases, made me realize at the airshow I could no longer trouble with doing my job.
It was still about another six months before my voluntary departure. I decided to see how little effort I could put in and still not get fired. I attacked every worthless local politics story that I knew some hayseed politician eager to see his name in the paper would provide obliging quotes. I did five second searchs in the archives for rewrite. In an eight hour day, I spent maybe 30 minutes reporting, after arriving an hour late, taking long lunches (at the courthouse… hah!), and parking my car to take naps under a shade tree. With a coupla hours of idle chat with my coworkers thrown in, time to call it day.
I hope you enjoyed that tale. I really just needed to type for a while to look busy before I leave my job at 4:15 to lounge about my apartment. I make twice as much money now and don’t hate coming to work at all. There’s a little slack in my efforts still, but of course I accumulated a mass of knowledge and skills in other affairs that encourages my employer to indulge me. I could leave this job and get another in a second making six figures if I was so inclined. But I’m a slacker. Anyway, I really hated my journalism career because it was so pointless.
Look, it’s 4:16. Time to leave!
December 15th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
#10049— It seems like said company is devoting all of their resources to web content. Which would be fine if you actually had things at your paper like “web editor” or “copy editor.” Neither of which we have. But hey, at least they gave us Christmas Eve off! Merry Christmas!