Does journalism have too many rich kids?

As it happens, my mother was born in Starke. Small world.

It really is. A small world, I mean.

In 1967, when I was almost twelve, my family went on vacation to Washington, D.C. Mama was big into genealogy and wanted to go to the National Archives and the Library of Congress to do research. We were there for two weeks. They found an apartment that rented by the week, and we bought groceries and ate breakfast and dinner there to save money. Dad, my little brother and I did tourist D.C. for the best part of two weeks.

So anyhow, I'm at the Smithsonian, in the Museum of Natural History, up on the third floor looking at exhibits, and I run into a kid who lives half a block down the street from me in Atlanta, played shortstop on my Little League team.

Small world.


Strange post. I guess I got triggered.

 

Does the evangelical movement have too many bigots, homophobes and neo-Nazis? Asking for a friend.

 

Depends. How far above 50% do you consider too many?

 

Hey, wait a minute ... I was one of the people stupid enough to work for it!

You're not wrong, though, MTM. If he was really upset that his employees qualified for WIC and food stamps, he might have paid a little more. And this was back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when small town newspapers were still raking in the advertising money.

 

Mr. Publisher didn't care that his employees were on food stamps. He was pissed because one of his local yokel country club big ballers was giving him shit about it.

And Mr. Country Club BFD didn't give a shit either, he was probably just pissed his tax money was supporting it.

Within a couple months of this whole episode, people around the town started offering me absolutely insulting bottom rung part time jobs: lawn mowing, farm hand, shoveling coal, shoveling snow, janitor, etc etc, which I could do in my "spare time" (other than the 80 hours a week I was working at the paper). Other staffers got these offers too, so word had gotten around town about our poorer-than-church-mice status.

One guy had a driveway probably 100 feet long with like 4 parking spaces attached. He said, "I usually pay a guy with a Jeep 40 bucks to come plow it, but if you wanted to come shovel it out by hand, I'd pay you 50."

 

Re: food stamps

In my bachelor days, I lived in a four-bedroom house with a rotating cast of media roommates. One day, the TV reporter comes in pissed off. He was working on a story about the state raising the maximum earnings you could get and still receive food stamps. He joked that thanks to that he could qualify for food stamps now - but wouldn’t apply because beer wasn’t eligible.

He’d gotten called into the station director’s office and was explicitly told he would be fired if he applied for food stamps under the “don’t embarrass the station” clause in his contract. He was told this over a joke!

But as the day went on, he got pissed because he was carrying student loans from George Washington* and making $24,500 - while having to pay for his own suits and dry cleaning.

* - He did not attend a fancy prep school. Mesquite didn’t have them, nor could his parents afford one anyway. He eventually left TV for politics and then lobbying. He’s doing fine now.

 

Jeezus. If you get $25 in food stamps, spend the food stamps on hamburger, then spend the cash on beer.

Also, he'd have the mother of all lawsuits (and probably criminal charges) against the station for attempting to obstruct him from applying for benefits. Even back in the 80s I think the majority of those applications were done by phone or by mail.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones grew up mixed-race in Waterloo, Iowa and went to Notre Dame.

 

I work at a Cornfield County weekly and never been more happy professionally in my career.

Missouri graduate, lower-middle class family.

 

For every Maggie Haberman, there's a Yamiche Alcindor, or Jamelle Bouie or a Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

I know. We knew back then. But fear of getting blackballed from the TV industry was bigger than the need for extra beer money. Plus, as I said, he was just joking about it.