Today hurt ... a lot.

Tripp,

Since everyone else has added everything I wanted - or could have - said, I'll just say hang in there, and thanks for sharing the moment and putting a human face on what has been an awful phase in journalism.

Take care ...

 

The worst thing won't be missing the people who are gone. It'll be the constant struggle to choke down anger when you see the product you're paper has become a couple of months down the line.

Honest to God, place I'm at, while our section is still pretty good, the paper as a whole is a joke. The shit we put out now we would've laughed at just a few years back. The half-ass stories, the bullshit briefs, the complete lack of depth, the errors and corrections -- it's just too much to take some days.

I'm lucky in that I have a setup that allows me to avoid the office, so I don't have to deal with it every single day. If I did, I probably would've quit a while back and found something else. The days I go in, I'm just depressed when I walk out.

But hey, a shitty product and an awful work environment is what you get when you ask four people to do the job of 12 people.

 

Tripp, it is people like yourself and your co-workers that remind me of something my great aunt said to me when she gave me a tour of the newspaper she worked at for decades and introduced me around. She said "Newspaper people are the best people in the world." She reminded me of that when I got into the business, some of the old timers I met as a boy even sent me notes praising my work she had shared with them. Most of the tears I've shed in journalism have been tears of gratitude to have been able to witness true dedication, selflessness and compassion on a daily basis in newsrooms. That appreciation will always be with me. After reading your post, I'm glad that there will be at least one person at your paper keeping that flame flickering.

 

i guess the question is, does his paper or what's become of the profession deserve him?

 

No. But the readers do.

 

the profession and the internet has done so much to dumb down the reader, i have to even question that statement.

 

I understand what you are saying, but what else do we have to believe in, except for personal pride?

 

Some of my hardest and best work, and many of my extra shifts and longer shifts, were done with two main things in mind: personal pride in my work, and refusing to let down the guys who were also there every night working their tails off to put out as good a newspaper as they could.

Trying to imagine readers enjoying the paper is too abstract of a concept for me to use it as a primary motivation. They lik it, great, and much appreciated. They don't, I hope they send a suitably frothy (and biased as hell, while questioning the paper's alleged biases) letter for me to hang on the bulletin board and chuckle at.

And . . . based on some of the phone calls and letters we get, I would say many newspaper readers . . .uh, exercise poor judgment in situations that require great intelligence. To be fair, that can also be said about much of society as well.

Newspapers don't deserve a dude like Tripp. Individual newsrooms still deserve great grinders (in my opinion, "grinder" is the highest compliment I can give to a newspaper jockey), and readers who buy the paper are seeking the best possible publication.

But newspapers as an entity, an industry? Dean Singleton, Sam Zell, etc. don't deserve anything except the sole of my shoe in their face . . .right after I step in some dog crap.

 

In a way, I'm glad this thread was started yesterday. So I didn't have to start it today.

Today, I'm devastated in a way I don't have words to express.

My friends, my colleagues, people I've known and loved and worked with and argued with and drank with and played basketball with at midnight for the last three years, are no longer a part of my professional life. It finally sunk in when I got home tonight, and the emotions are overwhelming. I can't even begin to describe it.

It feels like we were standing in front of an execution squad. You're shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who have been in the trenches with you every night, and every 15 minutes, you see one of them disappear into the dust. At times, you wish you could step in front of the bullet for them but your feet won't move and you can only watch them fall. You know it's coming, they know it's coming, and we all know why. But nobody can do anything to alter the shots.

It was like a graveyard in the office tonight. I imagine it will feel this way for a while, now that it's so empty. Desks were cleared out, some with a fire hazard's worth of collected papers and notes, some with three decades of a life's work. A museum of memories, irreplaceable; and a mentor to me. Some of you know who I mean.

What do you say at a time like this? A man for whom I'd run through a brick wall and back, who's had my back and stood behind me and done more for me professionally than anyone on the planet, was put in the position of ruining people's lives today. It wasn't by choice. He also saved some people's livelihoods today, when given the chance.

You feel so helpless. And yet ... you hope there's a silver lining, for those who are gone and also those left behind. But mostly, you feel helpless. No one deserves this fate. No one deserves to be treated this way.

I only wish that those charged with making these decisions were forced to deal with the same emotions felt by those of us who have been affected.

My best wishes to those moving on to a brighter future. All my best to those who will continue the fight. We all deserve better than this and, one day, we will get it.

 

Fuck.










Sorry. That's all I could come up with for the longest time.

My thoughts are with everyone involved.

 

It seems the sports departments have been hit the hardest.

Yet at my old paper: we have not one, but two old fuckers who put out two pages... of editorials. And they don't even do the layout, it's done by someone else. They spend their day, sipping coffee and discussing the "higher" points of editorials that apparently I don't understand. I always thought of the opinion pages as the skidmark of the news section. Verbal diarrhea spread out on a page in no discernable order. But that copy is read to within an inch of it's life. How else can those douchebags justify their 20+ year salaries?

We have three writers left in the LifeStyle section, who don't even have to write a story a day. Or edit. Or answer phones. They sit there. Literally. Doing ab-so-fucking-lutely nothing. Their section is done at another paper. They open mail all day, taking all the free shit and promotions, and take them home. These people were the ones who were pacing the floor when the cuts were ebing announced. How can these people still have jobs?

We have a sports columnist, who writes 50-60 inches of little else that his drinking buddies. He rarely goes to games. He rarely comes into the office. He can jet off to Vegas whenever there's a big fight in town. He's held accountable for nothing. This fucktard has the audacity of telling the displaced sports desk "Make sure you take care of me over there." Take care?!? OF HIM?!? Mother fucker, we lost four guys! How is it he still has a job?

And then we have one.......ONE guy, sitting at a bank of phones.... by an abandoned sports desk... BY HIMSELF... taking 40-50 prep scores, in the middle of the most widely respected prep sports meccas of America... with no help. No breaks. No one to get food for him. No contact from anyone... Just a bad recurring nightmare night after night after night... Heaven forbid he get sick or *gasp* take a vacation?!? He isn't an editor. He doesn't get perks. His friends are gone (and miss him too). He has to shoulder that load alone.

HOW THE MOTHER FUCK IS THAT FAIR?!?

 

Mateo . . . .Word For Fucking Word.

Especially on the columnist. I hope you guys slag his crap the way it should be slagged. Dude has skated by for years, producing nothing of value to anyone but he and his drinking buddies. And finally, he will be edited properly; no more of that bullcrap about respecting his work enough to not save him from himself.

The Los Angeles FUCKING Times does not have a "don't edit the columnists" rule. But that's a perk when your impotent executive editor has that wannabe Sports Dork's disease, befriending the columnists so he can be in the cool club. And then that editor saves his lazy-ass cronies while the true grinders get the shaft.