quote:Originally posted by Herschel:
The good ones are so few because that's not what people want.
Man, you're preaching to the choir. I was a reporter for 6 years before I got burned out by the "just get it first, and worry later about getting it right" environment.
It used to be that people would read the papers and watch the news because they wanted to know what was going on in the world. Now, more and more, they just want to be up-to-date on all the things that are going wrong with the world, so they know who to be scared of/mad at today. People don't want to be informed; they want to be outraged, damn it, and nobody's going to stop them! It's pretty hard for a journalist be serious about his craft when the people you're talking to just don't want to hear what you're saying.
quote:Originally posted by Herschel:
And being a true journalist sucks. The hours are long, goofy, sometimes dangerous and the pay has shrunk.
In my opinion, it's got to be a labor of love. You're right, the pay isn't great, but it was one of the most purely delightful jobs I ever had in my life. It was like going to college every day, except I got paid for it. I'd pick a topic, call up experts in the field and ask them every question I could think of until my eyes glazed over, and then write the article - which was kind of the final exam. And every week, I'd get a check for it.
And it's a huge rush to, say, get on a city bus and see a half dozen people reading the paper, and as you walk past them and look down you see it's your article they're reading. You're teaching them something, adding something to their lives that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And then you multiply that out by the number of papers sold that day, and you feel pretty damned good. That is, if you're the kind of reporter who was serious about getting the story right.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, for a few years anyway. Until I got sick of working with all the bottom feeders who literally couldn't even spell the word "integrity," much less comprehend what it meant. You want to get cynical about the American public? Spend a year writing for a large metropolitan newspaper. It doesn't take long to figure out where we took that wrong turn.
