Flooded town's paper behind paywall

That seems to work against the public mission of having an active, healthy citizenry. You should go to their website and rant about it.

 

Vital information should be provided over public emergency channels. The city/county website may well have all the necessary information, if in a less pretty form. While I'm sure the paper is a good comprehensive source for disaster coverage, I don't think people in dire need of immediate assistance should be leaning on it as their first go-to place for help, pay wall or no.

 

There is always the radio (with the ability to tune to the NOAA stations in your area), which is free and isn't dependent on having an active Internet connection. Relying on the Web to get info in an emergency isn't the smartest thing to do. The best thing to do to keep communications up in an emergency is to get a ham radio license and small transceiver.

 

The problem is that a lot of small-town stations wouldn't even be able to put local information over the air, they're probably all bird-fed.

Good job done with the public spectrum, FCC.

 

I wish I had your passion, Adam. ... Misdirected though it might be, it is still a passion. I used to feel that way about things, but...

 

Because it's easy to not care about money when you don't really need it that much. When you hit 25, 30, 35, your priorities change.

Trust me, everything you've said, we all would have said too at 22.

 

It's easy enough to live on $25,000/year when you're single and spend all of your free time at work. When you have a family, there are comforts you'd like in life like a moderately priced home in a safe neighborhood, money to take a modest vacation every once in a while, plus it's not all about the money.

When you have kids, you probably want to see them grow up and not have to worry about filing a 400-word story on the high school team that the editor wants know, even though only 10 people care about the team. It's also nice not to get bitched at by some parent for spelling some kids' name wrong or not mentioning the kid's 2 points in a blowout loss.

 

The other thing here, Adam, is that many (most?) of us got into the business when that life Stitch writes about was not a faraway dream but a reality we could plan on. The money was truthfully not bad for the work before, say, 2005. Yeah we were probably underpaid on a per-hour basis, but it was close enough and we liked what we were doing. Now for media companies, both the pay and the inherent job satisfaction have been stripped away.

 

Nothing - but that doesn't put food in your mouth.
I'm lucky. Mrs. Rhody pays the bills and I can afford my crappy paying job because the money I make pays for my car, loans, gas and food here and there. If I was single, I'd be at home ready to put a bullet in my brain.

 

Hopefully, and I mean this sincerely, you'd miss -- and the local TV station could show up and have you re-enact it, at which point you'd miss again, grinning a bit as you did, and then move on with your life still ahead of you.

 

Outstanding.

 

Going with the slim chance that this is serious, these things always remind me of three guys talking about women, and a 9-year-old piping in with "Girls are icky and I'll never like them!"