Are you a journalist? An angry one? Well, you can vent your spleen here.
Not any more. I was very angry when I was a journalist. I felt like msot of the “venters” on the angry journalist web site – unappreciated, overworked, underpaid. Then I got the hell out of the business for a while. And got a chance to teach journalism a couple of times. That’s when I realized that journalists, outside of their own cloistered precincts, are not admired and revered as they think they ought to be. They cannot understand that they are employees of profit-making businesses and, as such, on the “expense” side of the balance sheet. The news department is never a revenue center and its employees are never involved in any revenue production; as such, all efforts are made to minimize its expenses.
There was a time, perhaps, when advertising and subscriptions were sold to pay for the cost of reporting. Now, reporting is done to fill in the blanks between the ads. The last I knew, the ideal advertising/editorial ratio in a newspaper was 60/40.
It’s a business. Don’t be angry. Buy stock.
Somehow, I was thinking of you when I posted this. I just KNEW yours would be the first response. 
And, apparently, the last.
I’m an angry journalist.
Why am I angry?
Because my paper taking a “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” approach to the Internet.
Seriously, it’s 2008 and our publisher still isn’t convinced about the benefit of a Web presence.
Yeah, my previous job was like that. Whether it was stinginess or a belief that their readers were mostly older people who didn’t use the net, or some other thing, I don’t know. But their site was really embarrassing, almost empty, ugly, and full of coding mistakes. The people who put our stories up on the Web didn’t even check to make sure the quotation marks didn’t turn into ’s and things.
The journalists I’ve worked with over the years are more cynical than angry. There’s always frustration about being overworked and underpaid or underappreciated. I haven’t had to work in any situations where jobs were being cut, fortunately.
For whatever it’s worth, Sunrazor, I’ve never heard a coworker complain about not getting enough respect from the public.
The users of our site are imaginary, because we don’t have one. At all.
In fact, my editor nearly got fired by the publisher for trying to set something up not too long ago.
Reading that site made me grateful I didn’t enter journalism as a full-time profession. Dealing with bad, clueless editors and publishers is bad enough, but if I had half of these posters as colleagues, I’d kill myself.
Hence I whore myself out. My family eats, and I don’t lose sleep over petty bullshit. It’s a win-win!
Robin
If you can show him how to make money with it, he’ll do it. But it has to make money, it can’t be just an expenditure. He already has that with the news department.
Just having a web presence is of no value to a newspaper (or a radio station, for that matter – I work for a small-market radio station) unless you use it to sell stuff. Just using it to contact you and to read news stories defeats the purpose of printing your newspaper.
We use our website to webcast local sports events we carry, and charge advertisers extra for being on the webcasts. We charge for advertising on the website and for hotlinks from our website to our advertisers’ sites. We even sell our logo gear on our websites – coffee cups, ball caps, etc. The extra revenue the website generates returns more than twice the cost of maintaining the site.
There may come a day when newspapers haul the presses out to the dump and go entirely online, and radio stations do the same thing with our transmitters. Until then, however, the Internet is a tool for us to use to either reduce costs or increase revenue.
That’s probably because they don’t know how little respect the public has for journalists. I certainly didn’t until I left the newsroom. ASNE is constantly releasing reports about the low esteem the reading public has for working newspaper people. And what does it say about the state of television “journalism” that the urban legend about a majority of American adults getting their real news from Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” is passed around as if it were fact? If journalists don’t know they aren’t respected, they’re not paying attention.
I learned it on the first day of my first journalism class. At least I remember it as the first day, certainly it was early.
I didn’t say they don’t know. I said I’ve never heard them complain about not being respected, meaning they could know - certainly they complain about other media coverage all the time - and don’t care.