If you’ve read my ‘About Me’ blurb, you know I work for a daily newspaper in South Mississippi. Said daily newspaper is owned by McClatchy, the No. 3 newspaper chain in the country. Monday, the chain laid off 1,400 workers throughout the chain.
Ten of those came from my newspaper with five of the spots coming from our already woefully understaffed newsroom. The already overworked, understaffed copy/design desk (of which I am a member) lost another one. Schedules were tricky enough before, now it’s literally going to be like getting blood from a stone. My poor supervisor, already inundated with work preparing for the new computer system, now has to do some wicked voodoo to make the schedule work.
Wait, you’re thinking, what’s so hard about a schedule? Well, at a newspaper certain jobs have to be done on certain days. PERIOD. End of story. The A section has to come out, one way or the other. Any other job, if so and so’s not there to do it, it can be put off. Not so here. Also, because we’re not a truly universal desk, certain employees only do certain jobs. Yeah, it’s convoluted and insane, and it’s truly a miracle that the damn paper makes it to press every night.
So, on top of all this stress and worry, you’ve got so-called experts and academics ringing the death knell for print journalism. Well, they said radio would be the death of print. Not so, in fact, radio ain’t doing so hot itself these days (THANKS CLEARCHANNEL!). Then when TV came, they were oh so sure that newspapers were on the way out. Yeah, well, TV news sucks and it’s been proven time and time again that it suck. The Internet is a trickier, but many many papers are adapting, and doing it well.
That, and what a lot of people forget is that most of the people in this country do not live in metropolitan areas. No, a vast majority of your countrymen reside in tiny little towns dotting landscape. Yes, I know, how awful. Anyway, many of these darling yokels rely on their local newspaper for what they need to know. Some don’t have computers or Internet access. *GASP* And in the case of a natural disaster (like Katrina) what good is the Internet, TV or radio going to do you? Newspapers do not require electricity to put out. Long before mechanical presses, people did it by hand. It can be done. However, it usually won’t come to that because a smart newspaper will work with a publication outside the disaster area to get the paper put together and printed.
I’m not sure how I feel about all this yet. This is my chosen profession and while some days I cannot stand it, overall I totally believe in our jobs as journalists. What sickens me is the treatment of the news like a commodity. I hate it when people refer to the paper or any of our other publications as a ‘product.’ Since when did the truth as we’re able to define it become a product?
1 Comment
June 18, 2008 at 4:05 pm
*stands up and salutes*
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