This morning Dan got laid off by the Dallas Morning News.
We both knew today would be cuts, but we both thought he'd be safe. He is (was, I guess) a mobile journalist, doing photos, video and stories for the web and the paper, and he makes about half of what a lot of other reporters make.
But he got laid off, along with many, many other reporters, photographers and web people. He was the last person hired, so that may have been a red flag, but not a single editor got laid off. Not a single one, and yet those who generate content were axed.
Obviously, I've been on an emotional roller coaster today, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't affect my job today. I was having a hard time concentrating, I was forgetting things, I just didn't give a shit. I can only imagine Dan had it worse than me. I know we have it a lot better than a lot of those who lost their jobs--those who are married and have mortgages and kids or whatnot. There's enough freelance work out there to give him something to do, and he's already sending out his resume and pulling together clips, but this is going to be a huge, shocking transition. It's going to take a while for him to settle into the reality of this, I think, and it's going to take me a while to process it as well.
With the DMN making irrational business decisions and the Star-Telegram pulling shit like this in some misguided attempt to keep afloat, I can only say that I have utterly and completely lost my faith in the newspaper industry.
And as a reporter, that's a fucking awful feeling.
Showing posts with label inherent inequalities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inherent inequalities. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Monday, November 03, 2008
On Edge
On the eastern coast, it's about two minutes from Nov. 4, Election Day.
I'm trying to be optimistic, but I'm still anxious. Something huge is going to happen, and I'm just hoping it's not a disaster.
Dan has a friend who calls us both part of the liberal media. My being in the media has nothing to do with it.
It has a lot to do with health care, women's rights, the wars in the Middle East, the economy. Fuck--I need this economy fixed. I'm going to have to start baking my own cupcakes instead of just buying them at stores if things keep going the same way. I don't have the skillz to keep up with the country if we've stayed on the path we've been on for the past 8 years.
Midnight now in part of the U.S. There will be anxious postings tomorrow, I'm sure. I'm not going to get rid of this nauseous feeling until I'm 100% sure my cupcake consumption is safe.
I'm trying to be optimistic, but I'm still anxious. Something huge is going to happen, and I'm just hoping it's not a disaster.
Dan has a friend who calls us both part of the liberal media. My being in the media has nothing to do with it.
It has a lot to do with health care, women's rights, the wars in the Middle East, the economy. Fuck--I need this economy fixed. I'm going to have to start baking my own cupcakes instead of just buying them at stores if things keep going the same way. I don't have the skillz to keep up with the country if we've stayed on the path we've been on for the past 8 years.
Midnight now in part of the U.S. There will be anxious postings tomorrow, I'm sure. I'm not going to get rid of this nauseous feeling until I'm 100% sure my cupcake consumption is safe.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Pinked Out
In case you never set foot in a store in October or never see fliers or listen to the radio or are just a damn hermit, this month is the national breast cancer awareness month.
Sigh.
I have conflicted feelings about this month. For one thing, it's great that women, patients, advocates, physicians, families, everyone is coming together to raise awareness and funds for treating and eliminating breast cancer. It's the second most common cancer in women (after skin cancer), and the risk of getting it is about 1 in 8. It comes in lots of different varieties, from relatively benign to very lethal, and it has a huge economic impact when you look at lost productivity and money spent on care.
But holy shit, give me a break with the freaking pink stuff. I walked into the grocery store the other day and was greeted by a table full of pink iced cupcakes, pink magnet decals for cars, pink dishtowels, and a lot of other stuff. There are no real regulations about all those pink items out there for sale, and read the fine print carefully, because there's no real obligation to give any portion of sales to an organization like Susan G. Komen for the Cure or anything like that.
It's all just playing off of feelings, too, which is what drives me nuts. Buying cupcakes with a pink ribbon on top is supposed to make me feel stronger or something. Beats me. In the mean time, you'll eat lots of pink stuff and get fat, and fat in women produces hormones that can be related to breast cancer.
I'm glad to see people united, but at the same time, breast cancer has a pretty good treatment rate. Where's the love for the other cancers? What about multiple myeloma, a blood cancer my grandfather was diagnosed with? What about anal cancer, which makes people snicker? What about pancreatic cancer, which is incredibly fatal, most of the time?
I know that whenever there's a big cause to rally around, people will try to profit off it. That's what business does. I know that women are more proactive in their health, typically, than men, and that's why a disease that usually strikes women gets so much attention. (How come we so rarely hear about the guys who get breast cancer?) But I also know that most people out there with cancer do NOT have breast cancer, and we shouldn't forget about all of them and their need for treatment and disease elimination as well.
And as a complete aside, October is a pain in the ass for me. I've got to write some kind of story with a breast cancer angle, otherwise readers will get ticked off and think I'm stupid that I ignored the biggest health phenomemon on the calendar. But finding new angles, and especially new business angles, is really hard to do. I don't want to write the same story over and over. I can't just rely on this really fantastic survivor, because anybody who survives deserves lots of credit, and I'd feel crappy picking one person over another. Thank goodness for a few PR people I know who feel my pain and help come up with new stuff, though, otherwise I'd be miserable.
I'll be glad when October is over and even happier when researchers figure out a way to prevent breast cancer. I hope I live to see the day when it's a disease of ages past. I also hope it's soon, before I retire from being a journalist, so I can relish an October without all the over-wrought stuff.
Sigh.
I have conflicted feelings about this month. For one thing, it's great that women, patients, advocates, physicians, families, everyone is coming together to raise awareness and funds for treating and eliminating breast cancer. It's the second most common cancer in women (after skin cancer), and the risk of getting it is about 1 in 8. It comes in lots of different varieties, from relatively benign to very lethal, and it has a huge economic impact when you look at lost productivity and money spent on care.
But holy shit, give me a break with the freaking pink stuff. I walked into the grocery store the other day and was greeted by a table full of pink iced cupcakes, pink magnet decals for cars, pink dishtowels, and a lot of other stuff. There are no real regulations about all those pink items out there for sale, and read the fine print carefully, because there's no real obligation to give any portion of sales to an organization like Susan G. Komen for the Cure or anything like that.
It's all just playing off of feelings, too, which is what drives me nuts. Buying cupcakes with a pink ribbon on top is supposed to make me feel stronger or something. Beats me. In the mean time, you'll eat lots of pink stuff and get fat, and fat in women produces hormones that can be related to breast cancer.
I'm glad to see people united, but at the same time, breast cancer has a pretty good treatment rate. Where's the love for the other cancers? What about multiple myeloma, a blood cancer my grandfather was diagnosed with? What about anal cancer, which makes people snicker? What about pancreatic cancer, which is incredibly fatal, most of the time?
I know that whenever there's a big cause to rally around, people will try to profit off it. That's what business does. I know that women are more proactive in their health, typically, than men, and that's why a disease that usually strikes women gets so much attention. (How come we so rarely hear about the guys who get breast cancer?) But I also know that most people out there with cancer do NOT have breast cancer, and we shouldn't forget about all of them and their need for treatment and disease elimination as well.
And as a complete aside, October is a pain in the ass for me. I've got to write some kind of story with a breast cancer angle, otherwise readers will get ticked off and think I'm stupid that I ignored the biggest health phenomemon on the calendar. But finding new angles, and especially new business angles, is really hard to do. I don't want to write the same story over and over. I can't just rely on this really fantastic survivor, because anybody who survives deserves lots of credit, and I'd feel crappy picking one person over another. Thank goodness for a few PR people I know who feel my pain and help come up with new stuff, though, otherwise I'd be miserable.
I'll be glad when October is over and even happier when researchers figure out a way to prevent breast cancer. I hope I live to see the day when it's a disease of ages past. I also hope it's soon, before I retire from being a journalist, so I can relish an October without all the over-wrought stuff.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Strike Out
Thursday I had lunch with Tony, who was in town covering the Yankees as they played the Rangers for MLB.com (he's living the American baseball writer's dream). Tony and I met when we were both working on the "hawk" desk at the Globe, doing scut work like typing in agate and taking football scores over the phone from coaches with ridiculously thick accents. Sometimes I had to get other hawks who'd grown up in Massachusetts to translate for me.
Anyway, it got me thinking about my semester working agate. I did it three days a week; Thursday night until about midnight, Saturday afternoon until 9 p.m., and then Sunday late night, until the paper was pretty much sent to bed. The Globe had a brand new beautiful newsroom, but sports was in this part of the building that was old and skanky, with stained ceiling tiles and worn, green carpet and special trash cans you had to put foodstuffs in because there were mice.
An agate person is the bottom of the totem pole in sports; you type in scores, hundreds and hundreds of scores from every high school and university within a really wide radius, and you answer phone calls and fetch pages and first edition copies of the newspaper from the press, which was on-site (a rarity in papers these days).
What I hated and loved the most was answering the phones. Sometimes it was fairly straightforward, like taking down scores from high school football coaches, getting the names and yards run and conversions and everything else. There was also a guy named Frank from Montreal who was obsessed with the Bruins and would call almost every night, wanting to know if we'd heard any rumors or news about the team and its players. He'd like to carry on conversations about his hopes and dreams for the team. I liked Frank, because he was easy to prod into a conversation—he once told me about how he took a bus all the way to Boston once to see the Bruins play when he was a young man. (Tony claims that Frank never liked him and would always ask to speak to someone else if he answered.)
The worst phone calls were the random trivia ones. People would call up, often from bars, and want to know the answer to some really obscure question, like who the Bruins' goalie was in 1972. I think there was probably money riding on a lot of these calls, and this was before everyone had an iPhone and could look things up themselves.
The random trivia part sometimes annoyed me; I am definitely NOT a sports trivia person, but with putting a person on hold and using Google, I could find most things. The thing about these calls is it was men calling 98% of the time, and probably a good number were semi-drunk when they called, but as soon as they heard a female voice, everything changed.
Journalism is much better when it comes to sexism; the upper levels are still mostly men, but newer generations of women means that the work-force is much more balanced than it historically was. Sports is also better than it was; there are women reporters, occasional women columnists, but it's still mostly a man's world.
And even if things are better actually on the sports desk, no one seems to have told the people who call. A lot of times the callers would ask me if I knew anything about sports; there's no way they would have asked a male hawk that. If you call the sports desk, you should assume the person can answer it. (Despite my general lack of knowledge off the top of my head, I found answers for most of my callers, including a man who wanted a dissertation about brands of ice skates.)
Callers also asked me what I was doing working the sports desk; it was usually a friendly question, sometimes borderline-flirtatious (like I said, I think a lot of alcohol was involved), but again, a male hawk would never be asked that unless he had already done something to prove himself incompetent. (There were the odd total incompetents that would come work for a few weeks before they disappeared.)
And then there were the occasional callers who asked to be transferred to a guy.
Kudos to the world of journalism, and specifically sports journalism, for trying to get past the good-ol-boy culture that was ingrained into every newsroom in the country. Now how do you change the minds of readers and show them women can be just as competent as men? Do readers look at bylines enough to realize it when they read an article by a woman? Or are people just recognizing women when they see them in person as sideline reporters or something on the television? How many women sideline reporters are in that position just because of their looks, and how many due to their talent? How many will ever get positions as anchors on Sports Center or the like?
And is there any better entry job in a newspaper than working agate? Except for being a cops reporter, I don't think so.
Anyway, it got me thinking about my semester working agate. I did it three days a week; Thursday night until about midnight, Saturday afternoon until 9 p.m., and then Sunday late night, until the paper was pretty much sent to bed. The Globe had a brand new beautiful newsroom, but sports was in this part of the building that was old and skanky, with stained ceiling tiles and worn, green carpet and special trash cans you had to put foodstuffs in because there were mice.
An agate person is the bottom of the totem pole in sports; you type in scores, hundreds and hundreds of scores from every high school and university within a really wide radius, and you answer phone calls and fetch pages and first edition copies of the newspaper from the press, which was on-site (a rarity in papers these days).
What I hated and loved the most was answering the phones. Sometimes it was fairly straightforward, like taking down scores from high school football coaches, getting the names and yards run and conversions and everything else. There was also a guy named Frank from Montreal who was obsessed with the Bruins and would call almost every night, wanting to know if we'd heard any rumors or news about the team and its players. He'd like to carry on conversations about his hopes and dreams for the team. I liked Frank, because he was easy to prod into a conversation—he once told me about how he took a bus all the way to Boston once to see the Bruins play when he was a young man. (Tony claims that Frank never liked him and would always ask to speak to someone else if he answered.)
The worst phone calls were the random trivia ones. People would call up, often from bars, and want to know the answer to some really obscure question, like who the Bruins' goalie was in 1972. I think there was probably money riding on a lot of these calls, and this was before everyone had an iPhone and could look things up themselves.
The random trivia part sometimes annoyed me; I am definitely NOT a sports trivia person, but with putting a person on hold and using Google, I could find most things. The thing about these calls is it was men calling 98% of the time, and probably a good number were semi-drunk when they called, but as soon as they heard a female voice, everything changed.
Journalism is much better when it comes to sexism; the upper levels are still mostly men, but newer generations of women means that the work-force is much more balanced than it historically was. Sports is also better than it was; there are women reporters, occasional women columnists, but it's still mostly a man's world.
And even if things are better actually on the sports desk, no one seems to have told the people who call. A lot of times the callers would ask me if I knew anything about sports; there's no way they would have asked a male hawk that. If you call the sports desk, you should assume the person can answer it. (Despite my general lack of knowledge off the top of my head, I found answers for most of my callers, including a man who wanted a dissertation about brands of ice skates.)
Callers also asked me what I was doing working the sports desk; it was usually a friendly question, sometimes borderline-flirtatious (like I said, I think a lot of alcohol was involved), but again, a male hawk would never be asked that unless he had already done something to prove himself incompetent. (There were the odd total incompetents that would come work for a few weeks before they disappeared.)
And then there were the occasional callers who asked to be transferred to a guy.
Kudos to the world of journalism, and specifically sports journalism, for trying to get past the good-ol-boy culture that was ingrained into every newsroom in the country. Now how do you change the minds of readers and show them women can be just as competent as men? Do readers look at bylines enough to realize it when they read an article by a woman? Or are people just recognizing women when they see them in person as sideline reporters or something on the television? How many women sideline reporters are in that position just because of their looks, and how many due to their talent? How many will ever get positions as anchors on Sports Center or the like?
And is there any better entry job in a newspaper than working agate? Except for being a cops reporter, I don't think so.
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