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Bluedeanie posted: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. I can jump in on this one, as I write for a large media company in Houston - despite what people say, small community publications are definitely not going away, there are just a lot of growing pains particularly because it seems like the old guard has resisted a lot of the emphasis on a digital product to go out alongside the print one. As for the larger organizations like mine? It can be a nightmare at times: After graduating with my degree in journalism a few years back (because I'm an idiot and hate money I guess), I spent about nine months unemployed and doing mostly freelance work here and there with a few big publications and one or two smaller startups. Much of that work dried up, however, and I basically started cold calling every news company, PR agency, communications branch, etc. in the entire region. I got really lucky and landed a job with a paper that just had a breaking news/crime reporter quit, and was hired the same day I was interviewed. A month later, I found out our company was being sold and chances are, most of us would be laid off.  Fortunately, this did not happen and I was one of the only younger writers to have come out of it unscathed. Several papers were merged, more people were laid off, and others left due to prior knowledge of the company that bought us which has a horrendous track record of sales-first-editorial-last, only much, much worse than other companies that have followed suit. (needless to say, I'm definitely looking for work elsewhere) I work in an office which was once home to a staff of five and now it's just me. No dedicated editor, no other writer (other than a sports dude, he doesn't really count, no offense to him of course), and I write for three publications with a circulation of about 100,000. When people ask if I have a beat or subject I write about I just say "everything." You would think a company running some major market newspapers might have a bit of a clue, given our competition has a leg up on us in almost every respect but problems like these... quote:our carriers are poorly trained and paid like poo poo. quote:Papers also need to address electronic editions to keep younger readers interested and we've done a pretty lousy job. quote:We also have an app but it's so poorly constructed and marketed no one can even find it ...seem to be big trends among media companies big and small. In fact, everyone here is pretty much paid like poo poo despite doing more work on a daily/weekly basis than our competitors, who all pay anywhere from $4k to $7k more a year on average. Our digital arm is disappointing as hell compared to the competition, another byproduct of cutting staff to unreasonably low numbers with low pay. We have no clear digital vision or plan in place, our social media accounts are used for the absolute bare minimum (just pushing new stories to followers, no emphasis on interactivity or anything even tangentially related to building online readership), and our in-house publishing system is just plain  We've only just started pushing our redesigned mobile site which looks fantastic, but has had little to no promotion in any of our print products or our website so it feels pretty pointless. It really doesn't help we have three or four different "brand" names - one umbrella name for our online portals, the names of individual publications, and finally our parent company. There's really no clear, consistent voice across any product in regards to marketing, and it's an incredibly inefficient way to build readership. quote: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. 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. ...So, naturally, his Facebook page has more followers than most of our publications combined and officials keep him on the inside and allow him to pretty much walk around any fire/crime scene/fatality because at some point he was a firefighter.  Like you were getting at though, I've been able to meet and write about some amazing people. Anything involving the area's elderly volunteers or student projects are usually awesome and adorable, and I love doing even just general features on some of the surrounding family-owned businesses.  As far as weird/funny/crazy stories go, after working in crime and breaking news for a few years (and now in my senior reporting position where I'm a just a general reporter), I've got a pretty long list of strange encounters. The most recent one had to do with a guy that claimed he was God and county officials were going to take trillions of dollars that belonged to him and the county and started giving specific dates and times on when they would all die.  Surprisingly, it all had an unusually positive ending, as the police met up with him and his family and, rather than just tossing him in jail, are working with them to get him some help.
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Jun 12, 2014 03:22
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God drat, forgot about this thread since the forum meltdown.Captain Bravo posted:What do you TV and Paper guys think of radio journalism, anyway? I always feel like kind of the black sheep, since everyone else has such a high emphasis on visuals, and we're like "gently caress dat poo poo!" (Of course, being the internet age, I still have to take a shitton of pictures for our website/facebook. You can't win for losing. Here in Houston, the radio people are all really chill and I spend more time listening to our public radio station than reading our own news, honestly. TV news guys are generally a colossal pain in the rear end, though, with their stupid loving gigantic cameras and hilariously awful questions. That reminds me of one story that really drove home how much I hate the TV people here - I was covering a shooting at a local community college here. It wasn't particularly serious, it was just some fight between two idiots and a gun went off, but this was a few years back and people's nerves were already on edge because of other shootings making national headlines (these days, I guess that's every day unfortunately). For starters, we're directed by the sheriff's office to the other side of the facility to wait for a press conference. Not a big deal, but there was only one in and one way out for emergency crews, officers, and other investigators to drive through. So what do all the TV crews do? Each and every loving one of them set their cameras up directly in the road like a loving blockade. They were constantly having to move poo poo out of the way as trucks and patrol cars were coming and going and a few deputies looked like they were going to lose their poo poo despite their pleas with these idiots to keep the loving road clear. So then a few hours later the conference begins and there really isn't much info. "We don't know how many shots were fired yet, we will be releasing the identities at a later time, one suspect got away but we are pursuing him/would have him in custody soon/etc.," the usual stuff. I think the question of "How many shots were fired," was asked about five different times by four different reporters. "Can you confirm the identity of the shooter," was another that was asked about a dozen times. I've covered plenty of breaking news stories in the past, particularly one nasty one that got a lot of attention when some dude committed a murder-suicide in a really affluent "quiet" kind of neighborhood here, but I hadn't seen anything like this. It was like having other national reporters and choppers in the air made the local broadcast guys collectively lose their loving minds. The print, radio, and one or two of the non-crazy TV people (namely our affiliate, their people are actually surprisingly chill), couldn't help but laugh at some of the asinine questions. I was surprised the cameras didn't pick up some of us laughing towards the end when one of the camera guys for another station I'm familiar kept muttering questions like "What color was the bullet? What did the man yell as he ran? Did he have any spare change on him?" So, no, radio people are cool.
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Jul 1, 2014 22:44
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Captain Bravo posted:But yeah, I was at a conference a few months ago at Texas Tech, and one of the panels was just 5 local TV news directors chatting for a couple hours. The one big thing they all agreed on was "Holy poo poo, in the last decade our reporters have become terrible." It's really something to see the people in charge agreeing that they just can't find any decent people to do these jobs anymore. A lot of the better writers I know spend time dealing with the sometimes cripplingly low pay, high stress, shrinking editorial staff (and higher demands), and go "welp, gently caress it" and just jump into PR/PIO/media relations/etc. work. It's certainly been on my mind lately but... quote:How is the job market in Houston right now? I'm interested in a move, and wanted to get somewhere closer to east/southeast Texas, but I've heard that Austin and Houston are locked up tight right now. It really depends. I've had little luck finding just straight reporting positions in Austin (which I think is weird), and the positions here in Houston are insanely competitive to say the least. In general, communications-type positions seem to be easier to find out west towards states like California and Washington and up in the Northeast than they are here. I know a lot of people are hesitant about doing media relations and the like for companies like Halliburton, Shell, BP, and the other oil & gas companies here in Houston because all it takes is one Deepwater Horizon and, welp, have fun running damage control on that. Still, they pay well if you're willing to deal with the immense amount of shady poo poo and office politics... What sort of job are you looking for? I had an effort post on a rundown of a lot of the media companies here as I've got good friends working (or have worked) for most of the major ones, but I didn't want to type out all kinds of poo poo about print publications if that's not what you're looking for...
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Jul 3, 2014 03:54
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