Wednesday, October 04, 2006
A puzzlement
As I was laying in bed just now I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that for all the cognizance, insight and quite frankly numerous forms of expression it seems from experience that I have at my disposal I cannot be as stupid as my current professional position would place me given the steps I underwent in my education to get me to where I am now.
To note, the fact that I am the third-highest authority in the newsroom of the 4,500-circulation Daily Record and am calling myself stupid for having been thrown into that spot is not to degrade any of the perfectly intelligent people working at that newspaper. For the most part, however, they are working there because they have grown up in the area or they really do want to be there.
I am not of that class. I am here because I have fucked up every single opportunity either presented to me or invented by me with the assistance of contacts I've had the gumption to make.
When I graduated college I had an internship with a very prestigious newspaper. Now, granted, I got that internship largely because of the school I attended and the fact that the Blade generally kept an internship berth open to a Mizzou grad. However, I purposefully went to the University of Missouri and its journalism school because, among other reasons, I was very aware of its reputation by the time I started attending classes there. It was the place to be to know the people I needed to know to get where I wanted to be -- employed in a respectable-sized newspaper as a reporter upon graduating or shortly thereafter.
OK, now upon getting to the level of an actual large metropolitan big city daily I absolutely, completely, totally fucking froze. I made stupid mistake after stupid mistake after stupid mistake. I wore out the patience of every editor because of those God-damned mistakes and eventually was at a point where I was assigned long stories (which, because it was just easier, I made more time-intensive) specifically so my editor could scrutinize the final result.
Granted, both of those stories were published, but I was told by my editor in person and on paper that the only reasons why I wasn't fired from that job was because I was an intern to start with and because I was polite and responded to criticism which is to say I gave the impression I was willing to learn and improve myself.
My editor, who is, albeit, not the "teddy bear" type of supervisor, told me he had never seen that kind of work from a Mizzou student before. Yeah, the next year, no Missouri student was on the internship program. Piece that one together and yes, I'm still kicking myself over what seems like my accomplishment in besmirching the reputation of my J-school.
OK, flushed that opportunity down the fucking toilet.
So, by contact with my very friendly and hugely experienced J-school professor (who, for that matter, was once head of the editorial department), I got a job interview (from three states away, thank you) with the Joplin Globe, which flew me out from Toledo and back the next day on a Friday (busy day for daily newspaper journalists with three newspapers to plan) for an interview almost entirely because of my J-school professor's recommendation.
I was overjoyed to get the job, even though it was cheap-ass wages, because it was a job and I figured if I did a good job there I might have a decent chance of building up a great clip portfolio to apply to getting even bigger and better jobs.
Yeah, my first assignment was to dig up news in a tiny small-town-attitude-every-fucking-where county where, at least at the Globe level of activity, very little ever fucking happened (this has been verified by the wise old reporter who covered that same county for decades -- and HE grew up there). So for almost three months every weekday I had to call my editors and tell them almost consistently that even though they were paying me full-time wages for whatever the fuck I was doing up there I had no stories to pitch to them for the next day's newspaper. Yeah, and this is the newspaper that fired a reporter later for "lack of production", I think we'll hurt ourselves if we try to dissect that decision.
So, because of huge cuts by attrition in the newsroom staff I got switched from my first beat to covering suburban Joplin. Now, despite a very rocky head start (it was the winter holidays, very little daily news ever happens during the winter holidays), I actually had a beat with some news, things were happening and I had people in the newsroom I could ask immediately for help with stories I was working on.
Unfortunately the fact I am a huge fucking fuck-up caught up to me when I started getting errors in the newspaper and didn't seem to be able to stop the God-damned habit. I mean I had maybe a couple errors on my first Globe assignment, but nothing like this.
I mean essentially I had to leave to take the Lebanon job because it was my only offer (granted, my job search didn't go further than the Daily Record, but I was extremely convinced that my history of constant fucking errors was going to blackmail me forever from other journalism work) and because my editor (the one who had hired me 8 months earlier) told me the only reason she hadn't already canned my ass was because she knew I had the other job option available.
Yup, so despite pouring every single moment I had ever spent concerning my professional life into the journalism occupation, I managed to turn a solid-gold degree and a fantastic first big city daily internship into a 4,500-circulation small town daily in a fucking little burg where there's not a soul who's unmarried and in their twenties in the whole fucking town.
Intelligent? Bright? I've been called that most of my life and honestly I am overwhelmingly blessed by that. I cannot complain that I never received any sort of encouragement, I have received it in spades and I can't thank everyone who's offered it enough. But for all that supposed mental ability I'm still in a fucking dead end job in what is for me a fucking dead end town.
Not because circumstances beyond my control slammed me here, but because I fucking failed to live up to all the great things I had built up for myself when I graduated college.
To note, the fact that I am the third-highest authority in the newsroom of the 4,500-circulation Daily Record and am calling myself stupid for having been thrown into that spot is not to degrade any of the perfectly intelligent people working at that newspaper. For the most part, however, they are working there because they have grown up in the area or they really do want to be there.
I am not of that class. I am here because I have fucked up every single opportunity either presented to me or invented by me with the assistance of contacts I've had the gumption to make.
When I graduated college I had an internship with a very prestigious newspaper. Now, granted, I got that internship largely because of the school I attended and the fact that the Blade generally kept an internship berth open to a Mizzou grad. However, I purposefully went to the University of Missouri and its journalism school because, among other reasons, I was very aware of its reputation by the time I started attending classes there. It was the place to be to know the people I needed to know to get where I wanted to be -- employed in a respectable-sized newspaper as a reporter upon graduating or shortly thereafter.
OK, now upon getting to the level of an actual large metropolitan big city daily I absolutely, completely, totally fucking froze. I made stupid mistake after stupid mistake after stupid mistake. I wore out the patience of every editor because of those God-damned mistakes and eventually was at a point where I was assigned long stories (which, because it was just easier, I made more time-intensive) specifically so my editor could scrutinize the final result.
Granted, both of those stories were published, but I was told by my editor in person and on paper that the only reasons why I wasn't fired from that job was because I was an intern to start with and because I was polite and responded to criticism which is to say I gave the impression I was willing to learn and improve myself.
My editor, who is, albeit, not the "teddy bear" type of supervisor, told me he had never seen that kind of work from a Mizzou student before. Yeah, the next year, no Missouri student was on the internship program. Piece that one together and yes, I'm still kicking myself over what seems like my accomplishment in besmirching the reputation of my J-school.
OK, flushed that opportunity down the fucking toilet.
So, by contact with my very friendly and hugely experienced J-school professor (who, for that matter, was once head of the editorial department), I got a job interview (from three states away, thank you) with the Joplin Globe, which flew me out from Toledo and back the next day on a Friday (busy day for daily newspaper journalists with three newspapers to plan) for an interview almost entirely because of my J-school professor's recommendation.
I was overjoyed to get the job, even though it was cheap-ass wages, because it was a job and I figured if I did a good job there I might have a decent chance of building up a great clip portfolio to apply to getting even bigger and better jobs.
Yeah, my first assignment was to dig up news in a tiny small-town-attitude-every-fucking-where county where, at least at the Globe level of activity, very little ever fucking happened (this has been verified by the wise old reporter who covered that same county for decades -- and HE grew up there). So for almost three months every weekday I had to call my editors and tell them almost consistently that even though they were paying me full-time wages for whatever the fuck I was doing up there I had no stories to pitch to them for the next day's newspaper. Yeah, and this is the newspaper that fired a reporter later for "lack of production", I think we'll hurt ourselves if we try to dissect that decision.
So, because of huge cuts by attrition in the newsroom staff I got switched from my first beat to covering suburban Joplin. Now, despite a very rocky head start (it was the winter holidays, very little daily news ever happens during the winter holidays), I actually had a beat with some news, things were happening and I had people in the newsroom I could ask immediately for help with stories I was working on.
Unfortunately the fact I am a huge fucking fuck-up caught up to me when I started getting errors in the newspaper and didn't seem to be able to stop the God-damned habit. I mean I had maybe a couple errors on my first Globe assignment, but nothing like this.
I mean essentially I had to leave to take the Lebanon job because it was my only offer (granted, my job search didn't go further than the Daily Record, but I was extremely convinced that my history of constant fucking errors was going to blackmail me forever from other journalism work) and because my editor (the one who had hired me 8 months earlier) told me the only reason she hadn't already canned my ass was because she knew I had the other job option available.
Yup, so despite pouring every single moment I had ever spent concerning my professional life into the journalism occupation, I managed to turn a solid-gold degree and a fantastic first big city daily internship into a 4,500-circulation small town daily in a fucking little burg where there's not a soul who's unmarried and in their twenties in the whole fucking town.
Intelligent? Bright? I've been called that most of my life and honestly I am overwhelmingly blessed by that. I cannot complain that I never received any sort of encouragement, I have received it in spades and I can't thank everyone who's offered it enough. But for all that supposed mental ability I'm still in a fucking dead end job in what is for me a fucking dead end town.
Not because circumstances beyond my control slammed me here, but because I fucking failed to live up to all the great things I had built up for myself when I graduated college.
# posted by Solon : 1:29 AM
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