Miniver Cheevy I am not; the last thing I want is to become one of those mandarins holding forth on how we used to do it back in the day, when legends walked and rewrite men dueled compositors in hallways with rusty X-acto knives and gleaming pica poles. Let someone else point out how noble and important is the work that's produced in newsrooms; I'll just say I've never been in a newsroom populated mainly by the clear-eyed and mentally hygienic.
Every newsroom I've ever been in has felt like the set of some overly broad situation comedy if not a Tod Browning movie. ("Gabba gabba hey. One of us.") All of us are characters; some of us aspiring caricatures. Most of us tend to romanticize our work, some of us worship bullies, a few of us evince a bit of Stockholm Syndrome.
We are a somewhat shabby tribe, badly dressed and obsessed by pic-ayune matters. Yet newsroom people grow on you as they reveal their vulnerabilities and decency. They are--the few over-compensating blowhards excepted--largely unassuming people who tap keys and cradle phones and perform all the mundane little tasks that somehow, if performed diligently and in good faith, invest their product with credibility.
Most of us are happy to be here. But none of us got into the business for the job security. Newspapers have been dying out since I got in the business more than 30 years ago.
To be honest, there wasn't a lot of intent in my generation of journalists--we just kind of fell into the job. You used to be able to get a job in the business without an advanced degree, without any degree at all. It's not that hard if you can take notes and screw up the courage to ask a few questions. If you can abide the disdain of your betters and stack up a few relatively uncluttered paragraphs of passable English prose you're better qualified than some of those who've brandished a press card.
It used to be you'd follow the person who had the job around for a week, meet a few contacts, learn a few protocols, then take over the beat. And your predecessor would move on to some other, maybe slightly more prestigious beat--city hall or courts--and you'd be the new cop reporter. You'd do that a year or two, then move on. Maybe back to grad school, maybe to some other office--some other career--where the desks weren't so beat up and the people weren't so broken and socially stunted.
Where there wasn't such daily high drama; where people didn't yell at each other and, if they did, at least it was behind closed doors.
I never meant to stay. I don't think most of us did. When I joined the staff of the Shreveport Journal, I didn't expect the newspaper to survive five years before being subsumed by the larger partner in its joint-operating agreement. It made it a little longer than that but the end was in sight when I got there. Maybe it didn't matter that much; for me the newspaper was just a place to hang until I figured out what I was going to do with my life.
Most of my colleagues were of like mind; a few of them professed to be true believers who saw journalism as a noble undertaking, as something they were called to, but in retrospect just as many of them ended up in advertising or teaching school or tending bar. As many of us stayed out of inertia as achieved escape velocity. I'm of sufficient experience to have been around for the (sometimes early) retirements of a lot of my fellow lifers. And I've seen as many--probably more--thrown out.
It hurts when that happens. Mostly it hurts the folks who suddenly have to think about how they're going to either replace that modest paycheck or reorder their lives to absorb the hit. But it also hurts those left behind, who may not have seen it coming, who might feel a little scraped out and guilty at having dodged this particular bullet.
And it hurts you too--though you might not be in the mood to hear it because maybe your industry has been disrupted too, and maybe you feel like you're liable to be replaced by a less expensive option at any moment--because we can't be as good without these folks are we were with them. We'll suck it up, the people who are left will work harder, but we're way past the stage of pruning the deadwood. We won't be better without these folks.
I know people lose jobs all the time. Usually through no fault of their own. Someone has to make a tough choice, companies have to run leaner. We've all got to adapt.
You're lucky if you've never been escorted out of a building with your personal effects in a file box. Sometimes it's because they're not up to the job, or because they behave in ways that their employers find unacceptable. Sometimes people need to be fired. Sometimes being fired is even good for them.
But these folks weren't fired. They weren't even deemed redundant. They were just something we could no longer afford.
That makes me really sad. It ought to make you sad too.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 01/15/2017