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> but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And p
by tomnipotent 5y ago
> but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists
So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.
> and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work
This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoYeah, I'll put my 13 years of working around newsrooms and with journalists against your fantasy of what they're like any day.
- tomnipotent 5y agoI've done startups for 25 years which has included publishing, there's nothing special about the hours of journalists. Every profession thinks that they put in more work and hours than others. Ask anyone at a law firm.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoOh, "startups" you say? So no actual newsroom experience. Well, when I want to know what it's like to fuck around with Wordpress, I'll ask for your input. Bullshit indeed.
- tomnipotent 5y agoOnly a Top 100 internet property with billions of monthly impressions and hundreds of writers, but yeah sure no experience.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoThat's both adorable and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. I've worked in a newsroom. You've heard of one. It's like you're intellectually flagellating yourself with your own brand of self-importance at this point.
- tomnipotent 5y ago> you're intellectually flagellating yourself There's nothing special about newsroom journalists. Like somehow they're the only people on the planet with deadlines, or that everyone is waking their editor up at 3am with that important story that just needs to make morning print.
- sellyme 5y agoI don't see why you think "I worked around a newsroom for 13 years" is a good rebuttal to the fairly trivial claim that most professionals chose said profession because they wanted to do it.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoWell, maybe it's because he replied to ME and I made specific claims that he decided to doubt. Now maybe in this brave new world, some people don't consider actual lived experience to be worth a whole lot, but that's not my problem. The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events. Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?
- sellyme 5y agoYou're still missing the point that people tell almost identical stories for just about every profession in existence. The user that replied to you wasn't even doubting you, they were just saying that it's not special.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoI'm not missing the point at all. They ARE special in that unlike all those other professions he rattled off, these people aren't making jack squat.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance So this work you did "around newsrooms" and "with journalists" was sysadmin work? Have I misread that?