York Publisher: No Cursing (or Snickers Bars) in the Newsroom

What is this "bureau" thing?

 

I used to work with a bunch of foul-mouthed guys.
Don't get me wrong, I'd drop plenty of f-bombs, but I'd save them until the night hours when the only people in the office - which was right next to our main office - were the guys.
So one day we're finishing production and a meeting with our former ad head who's now the publisher. There's me, two other sports guys, three news eds and two reporters. I'm finishing my section when the publisher walks in. We start a debate about phrasing in a story and all of a sudden the f-bombs start flying. No big deal, nothing mean - just casual conversation. Question gets answered, I finish my section, we have our meeting.
Minutes into it she stares at me and says the language needs to be cleaned up because it's not a locker room. Stares at me again and says something like "especially from you."
A few weeks later they broke that office up, shipped me and another one of the sports guys to our southern office (25 minutes away, which was a huge pain in the ass for us) to eliminate the "locker room mentality." A few weeks after that I was fired and to this day I have no idea why.

 

Because of your potty mouth?

 

Had a crusty old co-worker who tells the story about how he dropped an F-bomb, only to look up and see a customer had her young child in the office.

He later apologized to the editor who told him "If you go to a strip club, you have to expect to see tits."

 

We had a guy call somebody a dumb bitch just as a tour group of Girl Scouts had entered our work area.

 

No idea. I didn't swear in front of bosses. But she hated me. Accused me of not working when we cut our sections in half after I decided I was done doing 60 hour weeks.

 

Well, there you go. You were slacking. And you probably ate food occasionally during work hours, too.

 

I much prefer an occasional f-word in our newsroom to terms like "metrics," "analytics" and other upper-management buzzwords.

 

Dwindling circulation, dwindling advertsing revenue and dwindling revenues and you're worried about some desker dropping some F-bombs. You've already taken raises and a reasonable workload away from these people, saying "fuck" is basically a job perk at this point. Don't rip that away as well. Then again, given the corporate structure there nothing surprises me.

 

Jelenic is rolling in his fucking grave after hearing about this one.

 

I posted this rant on Facebook in August after reading an online article called "The Complete Guide to Swearing at Work" (link below):

Warning: severe cussing ahead

I began working in newsrooms as a teen in 1976. Shit, we not only cursed like bastards, we got so fucking stoned after work together -- and that was on the way to the bar. The women were even worse. When men say fuck or blow or dick in a newsroom, it's usually not in a literal sense, but the women have no such restriction. One of my journalism heroes said shit and fuck so often that decades after I first worked for him, the company I worked for b...ought the paper for which he was publisher, and people at my larger organization found his profanity jarring, which was really their fucking problem. He is a better newspaperman than they were even in their wet dreams.

At age 30, I was working with an older copy editor who sat apart from us so he could chain smoke, and throughout the night you could hear him, every time something flummoxed him, loudly croak, "Fuck me, fuck me!" I was seated across from a quite beautiful young clerk, new to newsroom work. She kept glancing nervously at Walter and then at me, and finally I said, "He says that every night and he's hoping someday it will happen." And she was cool about it from then on.

Earlier, I worked with a wildman who, after being edited harshly once too often, left the newsroom and screamed, "They shoved the red-hot poker up my ass again!" Just as the publisher turned the corner and nearly ran into him.

Once upon a time we accepted such behavior. But in the late 1990s I was busting the balls of someone I'd known since 1976 and he bantered back, "And the horse you rode in on," and I thought it was a shame this old son of a bitch had to self-edit himself instead of saying it right: "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on." But some people there had a giant board up their asses.

It's the culture -- especially around deadline -- and it's a goddamn shame when some shithead decides we need to tone it down. It's so much more efficient to tell your supervisor that the story blows and we should shitcan it than it is to say that the story does not meet our standards and needs further work tomorrow. Especially if the cocksucker blew deadline and you have to make a decision right this goddamn minute or we'll all be in deep shit.

The problem is, if you cuss a lot at work, as I do, it's hard to not do it in social situations. A former colleague, David McCumber, wrote his first book about the porn industry's heyday in SanFran, and there's a thing in there about a woman who did live sex shows forgetting herself in public and touching her lady parts after doing that all day for money.

And note that by writing "lady parts" that there are some words I just don't use. Although I've heard female journalists claim to have balls, which startles me.

The complete guide to swearing at work – Quartz