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Paying dues

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Gator, Sep 15, 2010.

  1. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    There are a number of different ways to work up in any business. You can start at a small shop, where you get to do a little bit of everything and have exposure to a lot of stuff. Or you can start by doing grunt work at a bigger shop. You can (as I did) be a correspondent or come in an answer the phones on a busy prep night. All the stuff that's not glamorous, but essential to getting the paper done.

    Do it right. Do it on time. Don't complain. Volunteer to lend a hand where needed, but don't be out of turn. Smile. Compliment the others around you. Be eager to learn. All of these are good qualities in ANY industry.

    I think what is being said here is that there are few things more annoying than a younger person, maybe right of of college, who comes in and tries to reinvent the wheel, things they know everything just because they can text and tweet and shows a lack of respect for older persons who have been around for a while. Hey, I'm an older person now. I don't text. I don't tweet (I'm not a bird, for God's sake). I rarely have time to blog. But what I do, I do pretty darn well, thank you.
     
  2. I'll never tell

    I'll never tell Active Member

    Totally missed my point. The higher ups seem to ask first about your social networking skills instead of, "Can you write a decent story."

    Thankfully my big boss knows the difference. Even to the point they've recognized that grads coming out of one of the state schools know a little bit about a lot of social networking/web-based stuff, but can't write and report their way out of a paper sack. The grads from the other J-school don't seem to know as much, but are 10 times the reporters and writers so far.
     
  3. nate41

    nate41 Member

     
  4. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    A girl interned with you in college?
     
  5. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    Just because you spend eight hours on Facebook during the day doesn't mean you're qualified to work at a newspaper. Does anyone know what social networking guru really means? In my book, it means I really don't know how to do anything else.
     
  6. murphyc

    murphyc Well-Known Member

    When I was doing an internship 12 years ago, my dream was to cover NASCAR for a living, either for a paper or a racing magazine. Fast forward a bit, I haven't watched NASCAR in years.
    I've been at two small dailies and two small weeklies in my career, in addition to freelance work for bigger papers. To be honest, working at a bigger paper isn't appealing to me. Sure, less stress and less workload would be nice, but going to a bigger paper won't eliminate the core issues: low pay and long hours. I'm content with what I do and with my career. Aside from covering the Indy 500, I'll probably never cover a "big" sporting event, but I'm perfectly fine with that.
    My reporter graduated from college spring of 2009 and wants to be a sportswriter for a living. He's doing that here, covering preps. If he one day moves to a bigger paper and becomes an NFL beat writer, hey, more power to him. If he gets an offer, I'll gladly give him a strong recommendation and wish him the best. In part that's because he's shown he's willing to work for it. He's done sports but plenty of other stuff as well. He's learned photography, has good rapport with coaches and writes well.
     
  7. murphyc

    murphyc Well-Known Member

    I'll add that there are plenty of young people with plenty of talent who deserve to move up. But there are also those who move up more by connections and good clips.
    Once I had to hire a reporter ASAP. This recent college grad sent in her clips, which looked decent enough. My boss claimed he checked her references (turns out she went to the same school I did) so I hired her. Her first story, from a city council meeting, started like this: "It was a dark and stormy night..." I kid you not. She also made three references to how long the meeting went (for that particular council, it was an average-length meeting). Bottom line, she couldn't write her way out of a box but previous editors had made her stuff look decent so that the paper would have a readable story.
    I've had some interns that got some good clips from my paper because I heavily massaged the stories. Who knows, they might get good newspaper jobs because of that and keep moving up the ladder. What's the alternative, print the crap they submit as is and have a bad looking paper as a result?
    I still remember my final journalism class in college. We picked groups of four for our final project, and in-depth story requiring everyone to do their own part. I wanted this one guy to be in our group because he was the main sportswriter at the school paper and his stuff looked good. You can probably guess how his raw, unedited writing looked. I found out the hard way.
     
  8. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    If you are looking for a job and you can choose to drink a magic potion filled with luck, talent or connections, you should guzzle the connections every time.

    If you have 500 resumes cross your desk for one opening, a bunch of the people are going to fit the bill and be talented.

    But if you know someone who can vouch for you to the boss, you can shoot to the top.
     
  9. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    I do think there needs to be some distinctions made on the whole "young" thing in this thread. By "young people in high positions", are we talking fresh out of J-school and hired at the NYT? Or do you mean someone who's 26? Still young, but presumably, they've been working two to eight years in the field, and sometimes a fit just works in terms of personality and writing style.

    And echoing the people just out of school who can't find a gig... Of people who graduated in my class at URI (2007), I think three of us are still working as reporters. I know another five or six in PR. The other 50 to 100ish are in other fields.
     
  10. BYH

    BYH Active Member

    Most of the rapid climbers I've seen soared not on talent but the name value of their J-school. They never had to keep their own stats at a field hockey game or try and pry a workable quote out of a 15-year-old kid pawing the ground with his/her toe or shoot the breeze with the high school principal while waiting on line to get into a 250-seat gym. Those experiences are far more important in the building of a journalist than any J-school.

    But they had the J-school.

    I've also detected little passion from most of these J-school wunderkinds, whereas those of us who have covered field hockey, "interviewed" Shane and Suzy ShyALot and talked to Mr. Buzzkill have done it b/c we have an insatiable passion for the field and the naive belief that paying our dues would eventually pay off with a great beat or a great gig.

    But maybe the wunderkinds are the smart ones. They'll hang around for a few years, realize what a shitty field this is and that the pay will never get any better, realize they've already been to the pinnacle of the profession and leave the biz for a punch-the-clock gig that pays six figures. And we'll hang out here and wish we could turn back time.
     
  11. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    There is no such thing as paying dues anymore. Paying dues was for newspaper people. These days, there are no "newspaper" people, just multimedia content producers.

    This industry is too fragmented and unstructured, a reporter's focus and tasking is also similarly fragmented, and the business as a whole is getting younger and younger, anyway.

    The people who are best at and most comfortable with the current culture of social media and the emphasis on multimedia, and the ones who enjoy it the most, are the young.

    Ergo, paying dues is obsolete.

    It is just a matter of a particular person's degree of technical savvy/exposure and his or her level of good fortune as compared to that of somebody else.

    Probably because of all the multimedia platforms and departments now in existence, there is more lateral movement than there is any consciously planned and worked-at upward climbing.

    What really is impacting everyone, though, is the simple fact that there are so many fewer jobs in the business overall than there used to be -- for anyone.
     
  12. This is a very interesting post. I consider myself to be fortunate because the time between the moment I held my degree for the first time and the moment I started my first (and current) sports reporter job was exactly two months.

    Yet and still, I'm at a small community weekly and the prospects for moving up (or on, I should say) seem to be remote at best.

    Two things are saving me from abandoning this profession as a whole 1) I absolutely LOVE what I do, I just can't stand the office politics and 2) I'm single with no real responsibilities other than me myself and I. And until something changes one or both of those things, I'll keep applying for jobs and doing the best I can as the only sports reporter on staff. I just feel like I owe it to myself to keep a positive attitude about journalism.
     
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