the navel times and observer

I'm not sure how to write this, or even of what I should say. I guess the best I can do is not worry about it and write it with as much a sense of "train of thought" as possible.

In any case...

It's time to grow up. I was talking with a pastor about this in reference to figuring out just how important it is to work hard as far as achieving anything. Obvious? Yes. Oh yes, obvious to many things. But frankly I don't feel like I've had to work hard for anything. School? School was easy.

The way I see it is as thus: In school 70 percent of expected is just fine. you passed. good job, at least in one of our liberal arts majors. 80 percent - better. 90 percent - great! 100 percent? good job. Exceptional!

If you make a mistake than quite honestly you didn't lose much. You maybe didn't get a great grade an an assignment but most of those assignments really didn't matter much. Even at the Missourian there were undoubtably stories to fill in the newspaper which isn't that big to begin with and there are 90 reporters to cover anything. Even if the Missourian fails to get the jump on something it's not like there was every very much riding on it. I mean people were excited when the paper got a jump on something but it was still impressive - not like people expected it to get the story first. I made a royal mistake at the Missourian by not getting a story we should have. Somehow I did just fine at the end of it.

Not so at the Globe. At the Globe I'm infinitely more important and unfortunately I'm making the same stupid, stupid, stupid mistakes. I need to figure out how to fix these. The trick, I think, is to resolve the same issue I've had for a long long time. When I come up with someone that someone should know I need to get over not feeling big enough next to my superiors and tell them when there's an error. Tell them immediately so the communication is there. Not to let something die because I didn't have the courage to go ahead and stop it ... or at least molify it.

My editor pitched a story to me today - BIG DEAL. My editor is not paid to do my job for me. Granted this particular story was something I had already covered in a brief, just not for a story. I had the event. I was there. I covered it (twice, actually, i felt it was usable twice and there was newsprint to fill). But it was my editor that found the clipping somewhere, circled it, cut it out and showed it to me. That should have been MY job. Not that my ego is bruised, far from it, but that i wasn't doing the job I was paid for.

Essentially I am not meeting the demands of this job. I am paid quite a bit of money to gather information and report on it. Information with errors is a useless piece of information. It's not valuable to anyone. It's ridiculous words on a page. No one benefits.

Thus a correction is simply UNACCEPTABLE. That's that. Period. They're not my rules.

To repeat a phrase earlier in this blog there are few jobs where people are paid to guess at things, to not deliver a solid product. I cannot hope to get a job where I'm not expected to meet the requirements of the job. It's not like High School. 70 percent just won't cut it. 100 percent is the norm.