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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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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 10:50 |
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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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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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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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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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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 10:50 |
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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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