Birdscribe
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Deposed San Bernardino Sun Columnist Paul Oberjuerge has been nails with his blog, but no more so than with this entry from April 20.
http://www.oberjuerge.com/?p=75
Here are the two paragraphs that distill the frustrations of much of SportsJournalists.com Nation down to its essence:
But the post-Fear Factor era didn’t just start with the last round of layoffs. It is the culmination of a shifting paradigm. As recently as five or six years ago, some rock-star reporter out of college could get their foot in the door of a metro daily, blow away their editors, and soon find themselves covering a glamor beat. It gave the rest of us who were in no way exceptional the belief that if we kept plugging away, paying our dues, we’d get somewhere someday. But it started to seem fairly obvious to most of us that it isn’t going to happen. We might be dreamers, but simple arithmetic tells us that consolidation and content sharing are not a good thing if your idea of a glamor beat isn’t Long Beach Poly [high school].
What started out as sapped morale kept getting worse. It got to the point where reporters started challenging our editors. In LANG, it wasn’t just the kids just out of college supposedly paying their dues. Many of us locked in jobs for years (part-time pay for full-time hours, or full-time freelance) that were the legal equivalent of migrant farmworkers with laptops. At a certain point, it became apparent our dues was feeding a Black Hole. We weren’t willing to pay our dues in the way we had, and at a certain point editors had to accept the fact that they couldn’t pile on the workloads their editors once assigned them. What had always seemed acceptable no longer was. I think that fed a cycle that had a trickle-up effect. Middle-level management has had its morale sunken in a pretty significant way in recent years, too, and it’s finally working its way up the Singleton food chain. Working conditions have many people in LANG upset – mid-level editors included, and they’re speaking out.
Hammer, meet nail.
http://www.oberjuerge.com/?p=75
Here are the two paragraphs that distill the frustrations of much of SportsJournalists.com Nation down to its essence:
But the post-Fear Factor era didn’t just start with the last round of layoffs. It is the culmination of a shifting paradigm. As recently as five or six years ago, some rock-star reporter out of college could get their foot in the door of a metro daily, blow away their editors, and soon find themselves covering a glamor beat. It gave the rest of us who were in no way exceptional the belief that if we kept plugging away, paying our dues, we’d get somewhere someday. But it started to seem fairly obvious to most of us that it isn’t going to happen. We might be dreamers, but simple arithmetic tells us that consolidation and content sharing are not a good thing if your idea of a glamor beat isn’t Long Beach Poly [high school].
What started out as sapped morale kept getting worse. It got to the point where reporters started challenging our editors. In LANG, it wasn’t just the kids just out of college supposedly paying their dues. Many of us locked in jobs for years (part-time pay for full-time hours, or full-time freelance) that were the legal equivalent of migrant farmworkers with laptops. At a certain point, it became apparent our dues was feeding a Black Hole. We weren’t willing to pay our dues in the way we had, and at a certain point editors had to accept the fact that they couldn’t pile on the workloads their editors once assigned them. What had always seemed acceptable no longer was. I think that fed a cycle that had a trickle-up effect. Middle-level management has had its morale sunken in a pretty significant way in recent years, too, and it’s finally working its way up the Singleton food chain. Working conditions have many people in LANG upset – mid-level editors included, and they’re speaking out.
Hammer, meet nail.
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