Don't ever forget who runs your newspaper

I'm with her until she filed the "gender discrimination" suit and threw her male coworker under the bus. Gender discrimination had nothing to do with her losing her job, it has everything to do with her trying to get her job back.

That said, there's going to be much more of this. I worked at a paper similar to hers and it was to the point any criticism in print was too much. If the house next door to the fire department was burning, and it took them 6 hours to get there, you couldn't write about it or else the city manager cuts you off, the fire chief cuts you off, the police chief cuts you off ...

We dealt with this a lot and it goes back to writers and editors being captured by their beats and becoming stenographers. Publishers need to show some guts. As much as it hurts to lose advertising, it hurts much more to lose all your credibility, and that paper has.

 

They've always been like that. Read any story with a political bent and it's even worse.

 

I used to work at a 10K paper where the publisher routinely had the news people do stories to sell ads. They would occasionally try to fight it, but it never worked because, well, they needed their jobs. And if the business owners or his buddies at the Rotary Club felt the story wasn't good enough advertising, he'd chew the reporter out and make him or her write a second story about it the following week.

That same publisher also was big on listing the sponsors of events in stories because he thought it would sell more ads when they saw their name in the paper. And that same guy once wanted a copy editor fired because she put an event's sponsors in order as something like: "Michael's Restaurant, Joe's Plumbing, Tom's Fireworks and the Podunk Press." He was livid because the paper was the biggest sponsor (not that the copy editor knew that) and was going to fire her when she came in that day until the ME talked him down by explaining she had been there two weeks and there was no written style on how to list sponsors.

 

If this is the publisher's attitude, why work at a newspaper? Go be some PR flack somewhere, leave the rest of us alone.

 

I believe he began his career as a reporter, moved to PR and then at some point transitioned back. While I hated it, at least it gave some humor to his weekly, "I love being a newspaper man and getting to tell the stories of you, the people of Podunk County," columns.

And after the other reporters saw how mad he was when the paper was listed as the last sponsor, nobody dared question him when he passed it on down that the Little Caesar's needed another business story so they would buy a quarter-page ad next week. Everybody there needed a paycheck, as small as they were.