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For something that a lot of people are describing as antiquated, everyone has an opinion about journalism. (It wasn't too long ago that this fact was painfully obvious every time you accidentally clicked on GBS.) But the types of journalism we're usually discussing on big stupid forums such as these is on a national or worldwide level. Have you ever wondered what it's like in a microcosm? What it's like for the reporters who have to get up every day, work long, tireless hours and try to apply the same level of objective, serious information-peddling that the big guys Welcome, my friends, to the illustrious world of small-town journalism! I just left my last day at the newsroom of a paper in a small Mid-Missouri town that most of you probably have never heard of, at least by name. I grew up in St. Louis and went to school at Mizzou, and wound up here about two years and three months ago, after nearly a year of job-searching. It's been an interesting place to work, to say the least. In that time, I've covered anything from U.S. Senate campaigns and multi-million dollar state bond issues to church bake sales and community potlucks. It's an interesting mash-up, coming from a background and working for a paper that strives to provide even-handed, quality news coverage in a town where people call you cussing up a storm, expecting you to rush out and run a front-page story on how they got banned from the local McDonald's. And since I've got a long weekend ahead of me until my new job as a copywriter starts next Monday, I thought it'd be fun to reminisce over some of the nonsense that's happened over the years. How big is the town, and the paper? First I'll go ahead and get the names out of the way, since it's going to be kind of hard to talk about it otherwise. I worked for the Fulton Sun in Fulton, Mo., population 12,728. The Sun prints every day but Monday and Saturday and has a circulation rate of something like a few thousand print subscribers and about as many total weekly rack sales, depending on the week. We cover Fulton and all of Callaway County, which is one of the geographically largest counties in the state despite its population of just 44,332. Our newsroom is made up of just three reporters, an editor and the sports department — which is a sports editor and reporter — so depending on what is going on, it can actually be hard to cover everything well despite it being a smaller, rural community. The paper's focus is all local, so we really only write about the big federal or state stuff if candidates are actually stopping here or the news directly affects the area in some way. Fulton shuts down pretty early, but it has a decent downtown district that keeps trying to expand, two private colleges of good repute and a burgeoning art scene. It's also where Winston Churchill delivered the Iron Curtain Speech, so the whole town has a big hard-on for him and the National Churchill Museum is located at Westminster College, where he gave the address. What did you do there? My official title was Newsroom Coordinator, which was kind of a holdover from about 10 years ago when there was a bigger newsroom and that position didn't actually write. Realistically I was a reporter who also took care of a lot of the behind-the-scenes work. So I'd still be responsible for writing a story each day but I'd also be the first stop for incoming calls in our phone system, manage the main newsroom email, write up most of the briefs, handle engagement, birth and anniversary announcements, edited the columns we run from two little old local ladies who write about squirrel soup and how handsome Dwight Eisenhower was or whatever the gently caress, event listings and a shitton of other stuff. Additionally, my main beats were the city of Fulton, business (which I generally shared with everyone else in practice) and history, so I attended city council meetings, kept a rapport with the local historical society and so on, so forth. Why'd you leave? A bunch of reasons, the main ones being the job I was offered was for much better pay, steady hours, no holidays or weekends, and is in a town that stays open past 8 p.m. and is closer to my girlfriend. Also at this point everyone at the Sun is legitimately really great and cares about their job, but that wasn't always the case, and quite frankly our parent paper and company were absolute chores to work under. So what should we ask? Whatever, really. It's an interesting profession and a lot of pretty funny, frustrating or interesting poo poo has happened while I was there. Do you want to know about how on my very first day, I worked a 12-hour shift to cover city elections for candidates I had never met while our building was on lockdown due to a shooting threat? How about the guy who looked like 4chan came to life, waddled over to my desk and told me he was running for president in 2016 because God told him to? Or our god-awful editor who had never worked in a newsroom before getting this job and eventually quit to work in her husband's pizzeria? That's just a handful of things I can think of. If for some reason I can't or won't answer your question, I'll at least try to address it, but since I'm not there anymore anyway I'm pretty much an open book. Also if anyone else out there has worked/works in a similar situation, feel free to jump in and answer.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:55
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Oh, hey man! I used to work for the Southeast Missourian just a couple hours away. Way to go, small-town Mizzou Crew buddy.  With all that's being said about "the decline of print," did you really notice much of it in your area? Down in Cape, at least, the newspaper and KFVS12 is so ingrained in local culture that it didn't seem like our news was losing viewership as much as the doomsayers would say. It'd be interesting to see how other small towns and their cultures still rely on local news. How much do local politics affect what you can/can't run? Are you guys wary of some stories if you know the people involved are running ad space? Were there any stories that really justified why you got into journalism? I know it's hard sometimes with smaller towns, but when you get that one story, it's all worth it, you know?
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Jun 12, 2014 01:18
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Axel Serenity posted:Oh, hey man! I used to work for the Southeast Missourian just a couple hours away. Way to go, small-town Mizzou Crew buddy. Hello! As far as the decline of print thing, I think that's a much bigger concern for larger metropolitans and papers with a national scope. You see cities like Denver shrink down in the number of papers they can sustain, and you see staffs shrink and readership dwindle there. As far as small community papers, I think it's possible for them to shrink but I doubt you'll ever see them go away entirely unless they completely drop the ball on adapting to a modern readership. Blogs and web forums like SA or reddit aren't going to cover the South Callaway RII School District baseball game, so we don't have to worry much about getting muscled out of the market. That said, small newspapers can't get complacent, and there are a lot of ways the company was by the time I left. We've lost a lot of subscribers lately because we just can't get the paper to people, in large part because our carriers are poorly trained and paid like poo poo. Even besides the lousy hours, the cost per mile doesn't even cover gas in most peoples' cases, so your competent people end up quitting after a few weeks once they realize that and what you're left with is the folks who have nowhere else to go or are getting their primary source of income through other means. (In the past two weeks, we've had two paper carriers wind up in the paper for drug and weapon charges.) Papers also need to address electronic editions to keep younger readers interested and we've done a pretty lousy job. Only in the past few months have we gone to a paywall, all Wehco papers previously just posted like a third of the stories to the web. That doesn't do any good for kids who don't have their own subscription or out-of-town readers. We also have an app but it's so poorly constructed and marketed no one can even find it — it's named after the company and all four papers search it, and I have a feeling most Fulton Sun readers don't search "Central Missouri Newspapers, Inc." in the app store. As far as local politics go, I'd say we're pretty lucky in that everyone around here knows we're just doing our job trying to write stories and don't bother meddling because it wouldn't accomplish anything anyway. There are little quirks, the local bank insists on being called The Callaway Bank with a capital T in every single reference, and one of the colleges got hot and bothered with us when we ran an unflattering story about how they burned a shitton of money trying to open a satellite campus in Arizona that failed after a year, but ad revenue or not there's never really been a situation where we ultimately weren't able to run something as we wanted to run it. The big justifying stories? Well the warm fuzzy ones were probably when a local beloved philanthropist died, I wrote a feature on his life that people just gushed to me about, both while I was writing it and after. He was a pretty cool dude and did a lot for the community so it was cool to kind of capture that. I also recently wrote a story about a little local kid who had a stroke and was hospitalized with brain damage and an online fund to help with his medical bills jumped up $1,000+ overnight after it ran. As far as stories I think are really kickass though, a local high school grad signed a UFC contract to step in on short notice for a guy who got injured and I got to do the story. I'm a big MMA fan and he kicked the guy's rear end in a pretty fun fight, so it was really awesome to be able to write about a hobby like that. Apparently one of our state reps (who hates me, funnily enough) clipped out the follow-up brief I did and sent it to him in some generic "good job, vote for me" gesture that he bragged about on Facebook.
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Jun 12, 2014 02:00
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Bluedeanie posted:As far as the decline of print thing, I think that's a much bigger concern for larger metropolitans and papers with a national scope. You see cities like Denver shrink down in the number of papers they can sustain, and you see staffs shrink and readership dwindle there. As far as small community papers, I think it's possible for them to shrink but I doubt you'll ever see them go away entirely unless they completely drop the ball on adapting to a modern readership. Blogs and web forums like SA or reddit aren't going to cover the South Callaway RII School District baseball game, so we don't have to worry much about getting muscled out of the market. I can jump in on this one, as I write for a large media company in Houston - despite what people say, small community publications are definitely not going away, there are just a lot of growing pains particularly because it seems like the old guard has resisted a lot of the emphasis on a digital product to go out alongside the print one. As for the larger organizations like mine? It can be a nightmare at times: After graduating with my degree in journalism a few years back (because I'm an idiot and hate money I guess), I spent about nine months unemployed and doing mostly freelance work here and there with a few big publications and one or two smaller startups. Much of that work dried up, however, and I basically started cold calling every news company, PR agency, communications branch, etc. in the entire region. I got really lucky and landed a job with a paper that just had a breaking news/crime reporter quit, and was hired the same day I was interviewed. A month later, I found out our company was being sold and chances are, most of us would be laid off.  Fortunately, this did not happen and I was one of the only younger writers to have come out of it unscathed. Several papers were merged, more people were laid off, and others left due to prior knowledge of the company that bought us which has a horrendous track record of sales-first-editorial-last, only much, much worse than other companies that have followed suit. (needless to say, I'm definitely looking for work elsewhere) I work in an office which was once home to a staff of five and now it's just me. No dedicated editor, no other writer (other than a sports dude, he doesn't really count, no offense to him of course), and I write for three publications with a circulation of about 100,000. When people ask if I have a beat or subject I write about I just say "everything." You would think a company running some major market newspapers might have a bit of a clue, given our competition has a leg up on us in almost every respect but problems like these... quote:our carriers are poorly trained and paid like poo poo. quote:Papers also need to address electronic editions to keep younger readers interested and we've done a pretty lousy job. quote:We also have an app but it's so poorly constructed and marketed no one can even find it ...seem to be big trends among media companies big and small. In fact, everyone here is pretty much paid like poo poo despite doing more work on a daily/weekly basis than our competitors, who all pay anywhere from $4k to $7k more a year on average. Our digital arm is disappointing as hell compared to the competition, another byproduct of cutting staff to unreasonably low numbers with low pay. We have no clear digital vision or plan in place, our social media accounts are used for the absolute bare minimum (just pushing new stories to followers, no emphasis on interactivity or anything even tangentially related to building online readership), and our in-house publishing system is just plain  We've only just started pushing our redesigned mobile site which looks fantastic, but has had little to no promotion in any of our print products or our website so it feels pretty pointless. It really doesn't help we have three or four different "brand" names - one umbrella name for our online portals, the names of individual publications, and finally our parent company. There's really no clear, consistent voice across any product in regards to marketing, and it's an incredibly inefficient way to build readership. quote:As far as local politics go, I'd say we're pretty lucky in that everyone around here knows we're just doing our job trying to write stories and don't bother meddling because it wouldn't accomplish anything anyway. poo poo, that must be nice. This area is Tea Party heaven, meaning anything that doesn't fit certain readers worldview is OH MY GOD MEDIA IS JUST ATTACKING PEOPLE FOR NO REASON AT ALL SMH AT LIEBRALS day in and day out. One of the other "publications" here is a dude who just runs a blog and chases sirens and police cars all day and, granted, he's good at getting stuff first, but he's a horrendous writer, frequently gets things wrong, and has an incredible amount of bias bleeding through all of his stories. ...So, naturally, his Facebook page has more followers than most of our publications combined and officials keep him on the inside and allow him to pretty much walk around any fire/crime scene/fatality because at some point he was a firefighter.  Like you were getting at though, I've been able to meet and write about some amazing people. Anything involving the area's elderly volunteers or student projects are usually awesome and adorable, and I love doing even just general features on some of the surrounding family-owned businesses.  As far as weird/funny/crazy stories go, after working in crime and breaking news for a few years (and now in my senior reporting position where I'm a just a general reporter), I've got a pretty long list of strange encounters. The most recent one had to do with a guy that claimed he was God and county officials were going to take trillions of dollars that belonged to him and the county and started giving specific dates and times on when they would all die.  Surprisingly, it all had an unusually positive ending, as the police met up with him and his family and, rather than just tossing him in jail, are working with them to get him some help.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:22
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Awesome Welles posted:poo poo, that must be nice. This area is Tea Party heaven, meaning anything that doesn't fit certain readers worldview is OH MY GOD MEDIA IS JUST ATTACKING PEOPLE FOR NO REASON AT ALL SMH AT LIEBRALS day in and day out. One of the other "publications" here is a dude who just runs a blog and chases sirens and police cars all day and, granted, he's good at getting stuff first, but he's a horrendous writer, frequently gets things wrong, and has an incredible amount of bias bleeding through all of his stories. Let me tell you about Callaway County. It's informally referred to amongst residents as the Kingdom of Callaway. The reason for this is because the people here hated taxes and black people so much that when the Civil War rolled around, they felt Missouri was not seceding fast enough and tried to do so itself. The official story, as it's written on the Kingdom of Callaway Historical Society's webiste, goes like this: quote:Early in October of 1861, six hundred (600) Federal troops began converging at Wellsville, Montgomery County, Missouri, on Callaway County's North-East border. Their mission was to subdue "Rebel Callaway". The lawyer and former State Representative, Jefferson F. Jones, with the help of many subordinates, quickly gathered six hundred (600) troops to defend our county from the Federal invasion. So yeah I know a thing or two about nonsense Tea Party readers interpreting any type of news they don't like as "liberal bias." The editor I left under (no complaints, he's really good) receives almost daily emails from one kook who is livid there's such a liberal bias on our opinion page. He also complained the previous editor was hopeless in her liberal bias because she was from New York (the latter is true, the former not so much). The problem is, there's no inherent thought process behind it. Our editor and the general manager for all four papers in the region owned by the company sat down and picked out a schedule of syndicated columnists for each day of the week based on availability and when they move. There's a decent balance among them I think, but honestly I think there's slightly more conservative writers than there are left-leaning ones. My editor kept trying to explain to him that there was no real thought process to it, we use cartoons as they become available and our columnists are on a schedule, but he just doesn't get it and keeps writing him to compliment him on a "well thought-out opinion page" if he liked what he read. I also know the previous owners of the paper before Arkansas-based Wehco bought us were hardline conservatives and wouldn't let our editor put liberal cartoons on the page, but that predates me. So I'm lucky in that the actual policymakers don't get too lovely with us, so long as they feel our coverage is accurate and fair, which everyone there currently strives for.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:45
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Why. My question is why.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:15
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:Why. My question is why. Gotta start somewhere.  In all seriousness, traditional print journalism is still pretty heavily set in old ways. Start at a small paper -> work towards a larger venue. The internet and blogging has changed some of that since you can find good writers by surfing around the net a bit, but then you run into the problem of people who are good writers but not necessarily good journalists (see Gaming "news" in its current state). Sometimes working for a smaller paper shows you know how to handle reporting crime, business, politics, and a variety of other things you might be assigned while still remaining objective and without risking a major company's credentials in a national spotlight. Keep in mind, most of the big names in National Geographic's photographer pool started by working together at tiny-rear end regional papers in Kansas and Nebraska. Big News like CNN or AlJazeera aren't going to hire some random blogger unless they are extremely talented. They still want reporters that have shown they can do this on a daily basis and not just on big Feature stories. Bluedeanie posted:So I'm lucky in that the actual policymakers don't get too lovely with us, so long as they feel our coverage is accurate and fair, which everyone there currently strives for. Man, you're lucky. Cape Girardeau is Rush Limbaugh's hometown and oh man does his dad and family have a lot to say. Naturally, David Limbaugh is a major, regular contributor to the S.E. Missourian and most of the readership eats it all up. It's gotten worse since I left almost a decade ago, and I wasn't even in one of the major news divisions. When they named the federal courthouse after D. Limbaugh Sr. it was above-the-fold news. I try to keep reading it to keep up to date with the paper and recently saw some young gun had dared to write a positive article about gay couples in the area. It did not go over well. 
Axel Serenity fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 04:24
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I write for a small daily in the southeast, but as the life of a small paper is, I've done just about everything. By everything, I mean regular news, sports, lots of photography, page layouts, general reception work and changing lights.Axel Serenity posted:In all seriousness, traditional print journalism is still pretty heavily set in old ways. Start at a small paper -> work towards a larger venue. The internet and blogging has changed some of that since you can find good writers by surfing around the net a bit, but then you run into the problem of people who are good writers but not necessarily good journalists (see Gaming "news" in its current state). We take press releases from businesses. Perhaps only one of them actually knows how to put stuff in order and not bury their lede in the middle of the fifth paragraph. They also tend to spice things up too much with endless descriptions of pointless things. Unless you're quickly going somewhere with it, I do not need to know that there was not a cloud in the sky during yet another great win.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:53
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Axel Serenity posted:Gotta start somewhere. But my question wasn't just why small-town papers (which are definitely a special kind of hell), but why journalism? Like what are your goals and your plan here?
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Jun 12, 2014 07:07
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Anne Whateley posted:I don't get this point of view. You could be competing for 1 of 3 jobs in Kansas, or 1 of 5,000 jobs in New York. Really, who's like "hot drat, Kansas!" It's more that the small Kansas papers are likely where you have connections immediately after college. Most of my fellow Mizzou alum pretty easily got local jobs right out of the gate before moving on to the bigger cities once they'd built their portfolio. Plus, if you are a local to begin with, working in an area you know has its advantages and allows you to be a little more passionate about the going-ons of the area. As for why? Well, it's definitely not the money. I'm more on the photojournalism end, so maybe my perspective is a little different than the OP, but I like being able to outright show the world to people. I love telling stories the general public maybe had no idea about or showcasing simple stories in a way that makes them interesting. Where I'm from out in the sticks, people like to stay in their own little bubbles with the rest of the world only being seen in brief, touristy glimpses. I want to burst that bubble sometimes and remind people "Hey! This is happening! This actually exists!" Like, I can't really explain why I love sifting through Washington Post, CNN, and Aljazeera every morning. I guess it's the honesty of it all (when it's done right, anyway), and that I'm able to keep up with these incredible stories that are actually going on in the world right now. It feels like our culture here in the U.S. is leaning more and more towards escapism and shorter attention spans on a lot of fronts, so it's nice to be able to go into a field that showcases how amazing our real world is. Journalism done right is just the honest, and sometimes harsh, truth. Which is refreshing and extremely fascinating. Axel Serenity fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 07:30
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Anne Whateley posted:I don't get this point of view. You could be competing for 1 of 3 jobs in Kansas, or 1 of 5,000 jobs in New York. Really, who's like "hot drat, Kansas!" I've always loved to write and did well on the high school paper with lots of teachers and advisors telling me I have a natural talent for writing and reporting, and at the time I figured it was going to be a hell of a lot easier and more feasible to be a career journalist than say a novelist or essayist. In retrospect, yeah the pay was gutter trash, the hours were hell and I spent way too many holidays stuck in a newsroom listening to static over the scanner, but as RC and Moon Pie pointed out, the experience was incredibly broad and diverse. I've gotten enough hands-on experience writing, shooting and editing photos, page layout and design and other stuff to be ready to go for any lateral movement my degree may offer (such as copywriting, in my case) and I've also got plenty of less tangible life experience like dealing with batshit crazy people, time/deadline management, etc. So it was soul-sucky at times and I burned out fast and hard, but I wouldn't do it differently if I could start over probably. It was a great first full-time job, it just wasn't a career. e: Axel Serenity posted:As for why? Well, it's definitely not the money. I'm more on the photojournalism end, so maybe my perspective is a little different than the OP, but I like being able to outright show the world to people. I love telling stories the general public maybe had no idea about or showcasing simple stories in a way that makes them interesting. Where I'm from out in the sticks, people like to stay in their own little bubbles with the rest of the world only being seen in brief, touristy glimpses. I want to burst that bubble sometimes and remind people "Hey! This is happening! This actually exists!" This plays a part in it, too. Telling fascinating stories is really fun, even though legitimate cases of those are few and far between in a small town.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:31
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Which person most directly contributed to the breaking up of Brad Pitt and his wife, Jennifer Anistin
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Jun 13, 2014 03:02
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I worked in small-town TV. I repeatedly interviewed someone, complete with 40lb broadcast camera, microphone, and live truck emblazoned with "WHERE YOUR NEWS COMES FIRST", and after the conclusion of the interview they would say "so what newspaper are you from?" Please tell me the same happens to you in reverse.
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Jun 13, 2014 05:23
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hate pants posted:Which person most directly contributed to the breaking up of Brad Pitt and his wife, Jennifer Anistin A lot of people want to blame Angeline but it's totally Brad Pitt imo photomikey posted:I worked in small-town TV. I repeatedly interviewed someone, complete with 40lb broadcast camera, microphone, and live truck emblazoned with "WHERE YOUR NEWS COMES FIRST", and after the conclusion of the interview they would say "so what newspaper are you from?" Fortunately no, we were the only game in town besides the TV stations from Jefferson City and Columbia, who really only covered anything if something big happened or it was a super slow news day, so there was no confusion about who we were. I'd get way too many instances of talking to someone for an interview and at the end have them go "wait, you want this for a STORY!?!?!" and try to retract everything. Like no, man, sometimes I just bomb around town, introduce myself as being from the newspaper, ask a series of related questions and jot down everything people say in a notebook. It's a hobby of mine.
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Jun 13, 2014 06:49
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Bluedeanie posted:I'd get way too many instances of talking to someone for an interview and at the end have them go "wait, you want this for a STORY!?!?!" and try to retract everything. Like no, man, sometimes I just bomb around town, introduce myself as being from the newspaper, ask a series of related questions and jot down everything people say in a notebook. It's a hobby of mine.
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Jun 13, 2014 07:19
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photomikey posted:I worked in small-town TV. I repeatedly interviewed someone, complete with 40lb broadcast camera, microphone, and live truck emblazoned with "WHERE YOUR NEWS COMES FIRST", and after the conclusion of the interview they would say "so what newspaper are you from?" It's funny, since I took over as the News Director for a small cluster of radio stations in a small town, I've yet to have a lot of people ask me if I'm with the newspaper, or with the TV station. No, I just get every single person asking me if I'm with the station that's our biggest competitor. Every single day, it's infuriating. Anyway, the one thing I've found that makes small-town news worth it, is that you can actually see an effect. So many people get horrendously burned out in big cities and on the national level because change happens so slowly, that you often can't see any correlation between the work you do and the impact you have on people. In a small town, that poo poo is a lot more immediate. You really get the feeling that the work you're doing is making a meaningful impact on people's lives, and that's worth quite a bit. What do you TV and Paper guys think of radio journalism, anyway? I always feel like kind of the black sheep, since everyone else has such a high emphasis on visuals, and we're like "gently caress dat poo poo!" (Of course, being the internet age, I still have to take a shitton of pictures for our website/facebook. You can't win for losing.  )
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Jun 15, 2014 17:23
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God drat, forgot about this thread since the forum meltdown.Captain Bravo posted:What do you TV and Paper guys think of radio journalism, anyway? I always feel like kind of the black sheep, since everyone else has such a high emphasis on visuals, and we're like "gently caress dat poo poo!" (Of course, being the internet age, I still have to take a shitton of pictures for our website/facebook. You can't win for losing. Here in Houston, the radio people are all really chill and I spend more time listening to our public radio station than reading our own news, honestly. TV news guys are generally a colossal pain in the rear end, though, with their stupid loving gigantic cameras and hilariously awful questions. That reminds me of one story that really drove home how much I hate the TV people here - I was covering a shooting at a local community college here. It wasn't particularly serious, it was just some fight between two idiots and a gun went off, but this was a few years back and people's nerves were already on edge because of other shootings making national headlines (these days, I guess that's every day unfortunately). For starters, we're directed by the sheriff's office to the other side of the facility to wait for a press conference. Not a big deal, but there was only one in and one way out for emergency crews, officers, and other investigators to drive through. So what do all the TV crews do? Each and every loving one of them set their cameras up directly in the road like a loving blockade. They were constantly having to move poo poo out of the way as trucks and patrol cars were coming and going and a few deputies looked like they were going to lose their poo poo despite their pleas with these idiots to keep the loving road clear. So then a few hours later the conference begins and there really isn't much info. "We don't know how many shots were fired yet, we will be releasing the identities at a later time, one suspect got away but we are pursuing him/would have him in custody soon/etc.," the usual stuff. I think the question of "How many shots were fired," was asked about five different times by four different reporters. "Can you confirm the identity of the shooter," was another that was asked about a dozen times. I've covered plenty of breaking news stories in the past, particularly one nasty one that got a lot of attention when some dude committed a murder-suicide in a really affluent "quiet" kind of neighborhood here, but I hadn't seen anything like this. It was like having other national reporters and choppers in the air made the local broadcast guys collectively lose their loving minds. The print, radio, and one or two of the non-crazy TV people (namely our affiliate, their people are actually surprisingly chill), couldn't help but laugh at some of the asinine questions. I was surprised the cameras didn't pick up some of us laughing towards the end when one of the camera guys for another station I'm familiar kept muttering questions like "What color was the bullet? What did the man yell as he ran? Did he have any spare change on him?" So, no, radio people are cool.
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Jul 1, 2014 22:44
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Awesome Welles posted:God drat, forgot about this thread since the forum meltdown. Yeesh, I've heard some awful, redundant nonsense at press conferences and scrums but those are pretty drat bad. There were radio people who'd on occasion show up to the same events I was covering, but those were few and far between and our demographics were arguably different enough anyway that we never had a reason not to get along. On the other hand, our student-run TV station was just involved in a car accident they went out to dispatch recently, so that's fun. Copywriting is a pretty awesome gig, but I still keep in touch with the newsroom. My editor just texted me saying an outdoor columnist we run blamed feral hogs on Christopher Columbus and "the sheriff's department wants to know if I'm sure they don't put www in front of our email address before sending a press release," and then half-jokingly asked me to come back. I also got a three-minute tirade over voice mail two weeks after I left that my coworkers sent to me from a crazy woman trying to petition the city regarding a story I wrote like a month ago, threatening to go to a TV station that won't care and tell them what a terrible journalist I am for accurately reporting relevant information and omitting nothing of value.
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Jul 1, 2014 23:42
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Awesome Welles posted:The print, radio, and one or two of the non-crazy TV people (namely our affiliate, their people are actually surprisingly chill), couldn't help but laugh at some of the asinine questions. I was surprised the cameras didn't pick up some of us laughing towards the end when one of the camera guys for another station I'm familiar kept muttering questions like "What color was the bullet? What did the man yell as he ran? Did he have any spare change on him?" One of my proudest moments was when a few other journalists and I were interviewing a school official, and everyone was asking him a few questions. It finally came down to me, I thought for a moment before asking him my question, and one of the newspaper people said out loud "Wow, that is a great question."  But yeah, I was at a conference a few months ago at Texas Tech, and one of the panels was just 5 local TV news directors chatting for a couple hours. The one big thing they all agreed on was "Holy poo poo, in the last decade our reporters have become terrible." It's really something to see the people in charge agreeing that they just can't find any decent people to do these jobs anymore. How is the job market in Houston right now? I'm interested in a move, and wanted to get somewhere closer to east/southeast Texas, but I've heard that Austin and Houston are locked up tight right now.
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Jul 2, 2014 01:05
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Bluedeanie posted:I also got a three-minute tirade over voice mail two weeks after I left that my coworkers sent to me from a crazy woman trying to petition the city regarding a story I wrote like a month ago, threatening to go to a TV station that won't care and tell them what a terrible journalist I am for accurately reporting relevant information and omitting nothing of value. This is community journalism in a nutshell. The nearest non-public access stations to us are an hour away. We rarely cross paths and they're usually pretty chill. I have heard stories of them tripping over themselves and each other just get their microphones in at press conferences, though.
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Jul 2, 2014 05:20
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Captain Bravo posted:But yeah, I was at a conference a few months ago at Texas Tech, and one of the panels was just 5 local TV news directors chatting for a couple hours. The one big thing they all agreed on was "Holy poo poo, in the last decade our reporters have become terrible." It's really something to see the people in charge agreeing that they just can't find any decent people to do these jobs anymore. A lot of the better writers I know spend time dealing with the sometimes cripplingly low pay, high stress, shrinking editorial staff (and higher demands), and go "welp, gently caress it" and just jump into PR/PIO/media relations/etc. work. It's certainly been on my mind lately but... quote:How is the job market in Houston right now? I'm interested in a move, and wanted to get somewhere closer to east/southeast Texas, but I've heard that Austin and Houston are locked up tight right now. It really depends. I've had little luck finding just straight reporting positions in Austin (which I think is weird), and the positions here in Houston are insanely competitive to say the least. In general, communications-type positions seem to be easier to find out west towards states like California and Washington and up in the Northeast than they are here. I know a lot of people are hesitant about doing media relations and the like for companies like Halliburton, Shell, BP, and the other oil & gas companies here in Houston because all it takes is one Deepwater Horizon and, welp, have fun running damage control on that. Still, they pay well if you're willing to deal with the immense amount of shady poo poo and office politics... What sort of job are you looking for? I had an effort post on a rundown of a lot of the media companies here as I've got good friends working (or have worked) for most of the major ones, but I didn't want to type out all kinds of poo poo about print publications if that's not what you're looking for...
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Jul 3, 2014 03:54
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I'd like to stick with radio, it's where my strengths lie. I'll be honest, I'm not in it for the money, (If I was, I'd be doing sales, not news. ) but I'd like to get enough to get by, so no stringing. Starting back over at the bottom is no big deal, I was kind of anticipating having to drop down a few pegs to get back into a mass-market anyway. If you have a few emails of people who might be interested in my resume and reel I'd sure love to have 'em! Edit: And yeah, I know that the general progression is seen as Small-town news > big town news > PR! But, I would like to avoid having to sell my soul completely to a non-media corporation. Or to clear channel.
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Jul 3, 2014 04:01
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I hate to double-post (And revive the thread) but I thought it might be funny to add that after my last post, and saying that I'd stick with radio... I'm now working for a small-town newspaper. Turns out, that when someone offers you more money and better hours, it's easy to make a format switch!
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Oct 5, 2014 20:20
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My towns paper is only printed twice a week and always has a terrible print job often times messing up the days. No funnys no real news the latest one mostly talked about the cotton and peanut harvest. Glad you put out a good one.
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Oct 6, 2014 00:58
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Oh man, I actually love news about cotton. Like, literally, in West Texas I was subscribed to a biweekly publication called "Cotton News". Everyone else at work thought I was nuts, because I would get super excited when mail came in and Plains Cotton Growers sent the next issue of it. I probably ran more stories about cotton in the year I worked in West Texas, than that station ran in the past five years.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:21
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Bluedeanie posted:A bunch of reasons, the main ones being the job I was offered was for much better pay, steady hours, no holidays or weekends Didn't you say your next job is copywriter? Yeah good luck with the "regular hours" and "no weekends" buddy.
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Oct 7, 2014 15:05
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Captain Bravo posted:I probably ran more stories about cotton in the year I worked in West Texas, than that station ran in the past five years. 'Sup, West Texas journalism buddy. I basically ran a weekly West Texas newspaper for four years (I was officially titled "designer" but when you're the only employee other than the absentee owner, you're everything else as well). Cotton news sold papers, and at least one issue every October was headlined with the first gin (of five in the area we covered) to process a bale that year.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:42
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rndmnmbr posted:Cotton news sold papers, and at least one issue every October was headlined with the first gin (of five in the area we covered) to process a bale that year. Ahhhahahaha, finally, someone who will believe me when I tell them the story about how I more-or-less snuck into the gin to get the first shot of the first bale of cotton for 2013. What up cotton buddy  
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Oct 9, 2014 04:54
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rndmnmbr posted:'Sup, West Texas journalism buddy. I basically ran a weekly West Texas newspaper for four years (I was officially titled "designer" but when you're the only employee other than the absentee owner, you're everything else as well). Cotton news sold papers, and at least one issue every October was headlined with the first gin (of five in the area we covered) to process a bale that year. Hello, south dakota checking in, how do you have my job? (only i'm broadcast for a station that only produces two shows a week. ever see UHF? I'm like weird al, only we don't have an awesome janitor). We do get the one farm guy on our news program to come in every year at harvest though. only here it's corn and soy.
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Oct 9, 2014 06:23
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For all the cotton fiends out there SEMINOLE — The South Plains now has a cotton bale. Oasis Gin in Seminole received its first bale Friday afternoon from local farmers Eldon and Tina Dyck. The 505-pound bale was graded Monday. Its average loan value was 48.05. Gin manager Kyle Taubert is optimistic about quality and yield. He anticipates full operations under a busy ginning season within a month or so. Seminole has received 6.75 inches of precipitation this year and a full 2 inches last weekend, according to Texas Tech’s West Texas Mesonet. Some Gaines County cotton plants have suffered hail damage this growing season, Taubert said, but nothing close to the troubles affiliated with drought. “One thing we have this year is a dryland crop,” he said. “Our dryland crop ought to offset some of the acres we lost to hail.” The Dycks did not return phone calls from A-J Media as of news time. Gaines County has frequently claimed the South Plains’ title of first cotton bale in the past few years. Oh my bad forgot to say the twice a week paper is for the entire county not the town Darth Freddy fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Oct 9, 2014 19:48
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Oct 12, 2014 18:30
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Dang Freddy, you're right by where I was working. Did you ever visit Big Spring any time over the last year?
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Oct 18, 2014 09:29
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Semen-hole, Texas. It is, truly, a terrible place. Of course, every town on that particular side of Lubbock is composed entirely of and  . Including the one three towns north, where I began and ended my newspaper career.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:49
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