To close out the year, we recall a recent commentary by former Democrat and Chronicle reporter Nishad Majmudar, who wrote "countless veteran reporters used to tell me before I left in August that Rochester was a "destination city" for Gannett reporters. Now, it is a place many are looking to leave."
Areas we once called neighborhoods were lumped together and dubbed "zones," a stark reminder of the sterile, geographic market-driven approach the D&C and other newspapers have taken in order to survive --- or, in other words, maintain favorable profit margins for distant, faceless parent corporations and their stockholders."
Does this sound a lot like your newsroom? Leave a comment below. And have a good new year.
11 comments:
We are under constant threat of being shut down or turned into a shopper by our publisher, they won't replace those smart enough to leave, we have no union to protect us. How do you think we feel?
It's all about the mothership anymore.
Whoohoo! Made it through 01-01-07. Seriously, it's not looking good.
Life in the word factory ain't what it used to be. Might as well go PR.
We're always trying to beef-up on-line content and tech-enriched content...it's a hassle that has seen moderate success for us. The overall morale is more to do with the internal rather than the external. However, I think most of us feel this job is a stepping stone and we're hesitant to really set up shop.
I work at a small weekly newspaper. We just received our latest polls and found out 91 per cent of out area reads the paper. That is wonderful, but it still hasn't stopped them from cutting a position in the newsroom. Newspapers are not the place to work anymore. If you look at the amount of work each of us puts in, you find we make less than minimum wage. Poorest paid profession by far.
I really enjoy the job, but I don't know how much longer I will be working in the field. It just doesn't seem worth it when you are getting trouble from all ends - readers as well as other staff and management.
I've recently started in newspapers, switching from the non-profit field where the workload was too high, the pay not very good, and the office conditions and computers were poor. Newspapers are just as bad. I don't know about sticking around in the field either.
Gannett papers are the worst. It's hard to imagine a cheaper, pettier organization with worse leadership. Every day is a comical brown-nose fest between editors, some who pretend to agree with the game plan, most who have been with Gannett too long to know any better. Editors -- the planner/editors anyway -- don't talk about "news" anymore. They refer to it as "information." But then as soon as a big scandal hits, the click-meter goes into the red zone, and news is cool again. Clueless is the best way to describe the hack editors who have spent all or most of their careers in the Gannett wasteland.
Thirty-seven years in the news business, more than 33 with the same medium-size daily and I’ve about had it. The newsroom staff continues to shrink as does the pay for reporters and other front-line news staff. There are more managers with higher pay than ever throughout the company. Advertising alone has at least three additional layers of management from when I started.
In an effort to be “relevant” to today’s readers, we are at times just goofy. We are told hard news doesn’t’ sell, unless of course there is a scandal or major controversy, and then bemoan an uninformed citizenry.
I’m glad I’m in the twilight of my career. I would not encourage anyone to enter the business. I worked through perhaps the greatest days of American print journalism, and those days are gone.
I work in the weekly, community newspaper industry that isn't fading to black and doesn't have the doom and gloom outlook that the daily papers have. There's no "woe is me" here. We pound out a smaller, more local paper each week (in our case three a week) in an area of about 10,000 people. We're thriving, not fading. The tip here is folks, start looking to community papers for work, because the problem with daily papers is that much of the information is already out there floating in the Internet. Local content is not. You beat the 'Net or a daily any time by actually writing about local issues. No one else can cover it and do as well as a community paper can, because they understand the issues.
Often, you have young reporters that come out of J-school or wherever who try to make it at a weekly before going on to a daily. It's a big step up. In my opinion, it's a lateral step at best. You may have more general readers and higher salaries, but I've met my share of daily newspaper reporters that are definitely no smarter and no better writers than the average community paper reporter. If anything, their over-inflated egos tend to get in their way... To me, that's the trend. Why do you think that so many of the big papers are trying to do hyper-local web sites or try to drag up stringers to give more local content? The future of newspapers is not fading to black, only the dailies that have lost touch with their readership...
I agree with the thesis that the weekly community papers do local far better. In fact, a story that ran a year or two ago in a weekly is never "yesterday's news."
Smaller, more flexible operations are the order of the day. Learn how to incorporate the long tail, and let the media giants lead with the banal (and often misguided, misleading) "daily" news and sports coverage.
The readers are smarter than the daily paper. That's why they don't read the daily anymore.
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