Editor fired

Did you ever work at a small-town newspaper?

My goal is to get a job at a city newspaper, but until I do I'd like to think I'm working toward that here, not wasting my time doing something I can't use to help move up the ladder.
I'm offended by that. Read some small-town papers first then make your comment please!

 

Hate to tell you, dude, but she said earlier that she'd worked at small-town papers. Way show your reading comprehension.

 

You're right.

I see things and the emotions take over sometimes....

Doesn't sound like she meant to piss anyone off... Maybe if she said it differently.

 

Sounds like we're in the same boat. I'm ME at my 8k daily after starting in sports, and I agree with the poster who said balance is the key. I get advertisers who get pissed and threaten to pull their ads because I won't run their little granddaughter's fishing picture with the jerkoff cutline they submitted with the quote "Isn't she cute?" in it, but we also work on enterprise packages about the rising meth problem in local schools and the influx of illegal immigrants we've seen in the last few years.

I think a lot of it has to do with the publisher. The publisher when I was SE wanted to make sure advertisers got WHATEVER they wanted, no questions asked, but the new publisher I report to is more even-handed. He won't piss off an advertiser just for spite, but reminds everyone on both sides of the editorial/advertising line that we're a NEWSpaper. Your direction comes from the top down, and my publisher seems to have the right idea.

The biggest problem I run into is advertisers who think they can intimidate the 26-year-old ME into running their crap "news releases."

 

Cadet, I was actually very surprised you made that kind of blanket statement about small-town newspapers. While I think SCEditor went a tad overboard by calling you stupid, I can understand why your comment has offended a few people.

Add me to the list. I had an advertiser threaten to pull his ads over a mistake I made when I was at a small daily. In the end, he did pull it. I wasn't even a full-time employee at that point, so I don't really know all of what went on. But I know the SE and the ME at that paper were not the type to be pushed around and I kept my job, got the chance to prove myself and got promoted not long after that.

Some small papers do back down when a big advertiser makes a threat, but not all. And to lump them all together and say they don't practice journalism at all is damn disrespectful to a very large number of people in our business.

 

I once got turned down by a weekly paper that put the hamster races at the local Ben Franklin on page one...

 

This isn't a rebuke of Cadet, who misspoke before her morning coffee and has apologized for having done so. I post it rather as an occasion for cautious optimism on the part of those folks who work for smalltown newspapers.

It's just a reminder that good journalism can be practiced anywhere - by newspapers of any size - if the people at those papers are willing to do so.

Because it's not the size of the paper in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the paper:

http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=121028

 

I have a little insight on the Griffin situation. Without going into detail, which I'm sure someone will do along these threads, there has been some action. Griffin is not the best place in the world to work. David Clevenger, the publisher, can be a hard guy to work for.

 

Having grown up a hop-skip-n'-a-leap from Griffin, I can tell you Griffin makes say, Macon, GA, look like Gotham.

It's not just "small town," it's very very small town. I wonder if Griffin can be considered a suburb of Atlanta. I'm not sure most folks from Griffin even want to associate themselves with Atlanta.

Go Bears!

 

It uses the suburban Atlanta role when they think it is appropriate.

 

Small-town papers? How about the whole industry?