Something Something Detroit

I’m wary of sweeping trend pieces like the one in the New York Times a few weeks ago that described Bushwick in Brooklyn as having a “bohemian vibe” and tout that it’s at the heart of some sort of artistic revolution. A co-op or two does not a revolution make, and sure there may by a group of young white people making art and sharing stuff in part of Bushwick, but the last thing I got from the Bushwick in the past two years that I visited the neighborhood frequently was a “bohemian vibe.”

And that’s the problem with any urban area – there’s no one story. Detroit is the easiest example, and has been used as such exhaustively over the past couple of years. As Vice pointed out in it’s 2009 story called "Something, something, something, Detroit: Lazy journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff," Detroit’s decay became shorthand for all that is going wrong in American during the recession and abandoned buildings are as beautiful to photographers as sunsets (hell I love photographing abandoned buildings too). Of course there’s a lot of crime, tons of poverty, and LOTS of abandoned houses. But it’s not the whole story of Detroit and also far from one that should be used to illustrate the economic collapse of 2008-present day. News by definition should be NEW and there have been abandoned buildings in Detroit for decades.

And then there’s the other story of Detroit, one of its “creative renaissance” and this video is so interesting and encouraging, and such great PR for the city that needs it so badly. I’m glad they spoke to people who live there rather than just about them, but still why does Detroit need effing Johnny Knoxville to come in and tell the world about it? Yes there’s stuff happening in Detroit, but just like Bushwick, I don’t know that it can really be labeled as sort of trend in the same way that it’s not accurate to label the whole area as abandoned and hopeless. Both, as a woman in the video calls it, are “pick and choose journalism.”

Of course perpetuating a narrative of an artist utopia isn’t nearly as harmful as perpetuating one of hopeless blight, but my point is that neither is accurate, and that an urban area is complex and can’t be boiled down to a trend piece as simple as “Hippies now in Bushwick” or “Stuff is abandoned in Detroit.” To do so is just lazy journalism.

Complex reporting isn’t short and easy to digest, nor is it cheap and fast to produce, and no one benefits from some New Yorker dropping by a few abandoned buildings or hipster bars and proclaiming what a city he spent 12 hours in is all about. The last thing Detroit or needs is another journalist who is looking to make it a metaphor or someone like me who left for greener pastures dropping back in for a quick byline and then ducking back to an overpriced neighborhood on the East Coast to education everyone on what’s happening in the flyover states.

Those most qualified to tell the world the real story are the journalists who stayed –some of the reporting at publications like Metro Times Detroit and The Detroit Free Press is among the best I’ve seen. Let’s give them national attention rather than treating the city like an easy trend piece.

Your voice is only as loud as the lazy media who covers it

So there’s some crazy pants minster in some small church in Florida who wants to burn the Koran tomorrow. This isn’t news, or at least it shouldn’t be. But bigger and bigger spotlights have been pointed at Terry Jones in the past weeks and he’s been given a more and further reaching microphones.

The New York Times points out the he and other nut jobs have tried similar stunts in the past with little to no media coverage, and blame this partly on the end of summer slow news season/ 24-hour news cycle.

But I call Bull Shit. There’s no such thing a slow news days/season. Sure, there’s times when huge earth shattering or catastrophic events aren’t happening, and more people are on vacation. But newsworthy stuff is still happening—and this ladies and gentlemen isn’t it. This guy is no different than the religious wackos on the someway screaming about how the end is near. But we don’t put them on the Today Show, the President isn’t issuing statements about them. We recognize them for what they are: possibly in need of medication, but not worthy of debating or trying to reason with.

A person’s message is only as powerful as the platform it’s given. My platform is a blog that’s read by 3 people and the guy on the street who said “Preach it! Fight the good fight!” when he overheard me complaining last night. If anything Terry Jones should be preaching about it’s PR.

Paying to Work?

Last week Atlantic Media decided to start paying interns , including retroactively paying last year’s interns. This is huge news for journalism interns. For college students (and graduates!) who want to get experience at a publication (and often more than one internship is necessary if you ever ever want to get hired anywhere) unpaid internships are de rigueur. And these aren’t coffee-fetching internships (do those even exist anymore?) These are (as many articles have been pointing out lately) what would otherwise be paid staff or freelance jobs. In fact, the students filling these unpaid positions are often in fact paying for the privilege since they complete the internship for college credit which even though the college isn’t providing the education or experience, they still must pay tuition for.

During my time at Popular Photography I was in charge of hiring and supervising (and assigning work to) several interns, all (but one who shall remain nameless, but she should know who she is) of these interns were incredibly smart and hard working, and I did my best to give them meaningful work that they could not only learn from but leaving with something valuable to put on their resumes and clips to show. They all interned for college credit and worked part-time around paying job schedules. But we never gave them a dime, and the work that they did was things that we didn’t have the budget to pay staff or freelancers for.

When I was in college I was an unpaid intern at Metro Times Detroit (and paid for the college credit to do it), I was there part time around two other part time paying jobs, but the experience remains one of my fondest journalistic memories (it was thrilling to feel like a real reporter and be sent out on assignment and pitch ideas, and work alongside and learn from some of the savviest journalists I’ve ever met). I did a lot of small work there for which I wasn’t paid, but when I pitched and wrote two feature stories I was paid (an albeit very small) freelance rate, and walked out with solid clips and experience. I have no doubt that internship helped me as I started my career.

While few publications (like Atlantic media and Mother Jones) offer paid internships, the competiveness of the publishing world (especially now when experienced journalists are working beneath their skill level) shows no sign of letting up, while paying positions (and entire publications) are becoming less available. So paying interns should be common practice, but unless it becomes illegal to hire people and not pay them (it should!) I doubt many if any publications will follow Atlantic’s lead. If fact some of the woman’s glossies seem to be going the opposite direction—auctioning off the privilege of working there; there is currently a $12,000 bid to work next to Anna Wintour at Vogue for a week. While that example may be solely for the morbid curiosity of working with the Devil Wears Prada, internships at magazines like Elle have also been auctioned off.

It’s a Catch 22 as a college student or recent grad; you don’t have the experience to get hired, and the only way you can get the experience is to work for free. While publications can’t (or won’t pay interns like they would real employees—and maybe that shouldn’t since there is often a lot of work teaching on the staff’s part—they could at least provide freelance pay for the work they publish.

To Please a Woman

Jezebel pointed yesterday to a recent interview Cosmo’s EIC Kate White did with Media Bistro. In it she was asked about the reputation of the magazine being a little outdated with it’s approach to relationships. Here’s what she said:

"I think there are some people who think that it's still that retro magazine from the 70s, all about guy-pleasing. And it really is not that way at all. Certainly a big part of Cosmo — we're the relationship bible, and a big part is helping women navigate relationships and understand what makes men tick because they're so baffling! But we approach relationships with the idea of — we're teaching women and showing them how to please guys, but we're expecting that they're getting that back from the guys — that somewhere the guys are learning that information, maybe from their friends, or from websites, or other magazines."

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First I take issue with the whole “men are so baffling!” thing. The men are from Mars women from Venus thing is like the “white people be like this and black people be like this” jokes, it’s just a tired and lazy perspective based on oft-untrue or outdated stereotypes. Sure, there are a lot of differences between men and women, but I don’t think figuring out what a man is looking for out of sex or a relationship is really that difficult, especially if you, you know…ask them.

The biggest problem with her statement is that she expects that guys are magically learning how to please women somewhere. I’m not so sure. And granted men aren’t reading Cosmo, but that doesn’t mean the onus isn’t completely off women’s magazines like hers. More than 95% of their sex and relationship content is about what women are doing wrong and how to make sure he’s sexually satisfied.

What about making sure you are sexually satisfied (whether bestowing the knowledge of how to take care of business yourself or how to make sure that dude you’re so concerned about pleasing in the sack is returning the favor)? What about how to negotiate the tricky ground of equality in a relationship. It’s not news that many women’s magazines make women feel bad about themselves and many men’s magazines objectify women and promote some rather disgusting treatment of women (like how to trick them into sleeping with you).

Still after White’s comment about hoping that men are learning how to please women “from their friends (where’d they learn?), websites, or other magazines” I decided to see what about pleasing women is available for men. Below the cover blurbs from the January and February 2010 issues of both Cosmo and Maxim (what I deemed to be Cosmo’s male equivalent).

Cosmo January 2010 cover:

100% Hotter Sex: Thrill every inch of his body using a move no woman has dared to try on him before

50 Ways to have fun with your guy

The New Male Sex Habit that can hurt a relationship

Maxim January 2010 cover:

Swimsuit Bonus: 16 Pages of Miami’s hottest bikini girls

Double your salary in 2010

Wet and Wild Olivia Munn (with a spead eagle soaking wet photo)

Hangover survival guide

Cosmo February 2010 cover:

The Hour Men Crave Sex the Most

How to deal with a jealous Bitch…when that Jealous bitch is you

What makes a woman irresistible

99 Sex moves: sweet and slow, quick and dirty and everything inbetween

Maxim February 2010:

Amanda Bynes Grown up and uncovered

The 25 Best Beers

Tiger’s Texting Temptress Hot new Photos

The secret to no fail sex

What have we learned? Men drink a lot, like to look at sexy ladies (be they a golfer’s mistress or a barely legal Disney star), have the ability to advance in their careers and need help keeping it up (probably all that beer). Meanwhile, women need to stop being jealous bitches, must make themselves more desirable and come up with all kinds of different ways to have sex. Glad we’ve come so far Kate White…

Working Harder, Not Smarter

I don't own a home to lose, I don't have a family to feed, my story isn't that sob worthy by any means. I realize this. But what it is, is demoralizing.

I lost my job, and so I started working exceedingly hard to find a new one. I've said yes to every journalistic freelance opportunity (even going so far as to try to write a press release in exchange for a haircut). And unlike many, I've been lucky to end up with assignments that will ultimately help my portfolio and perhaps someday advance my career. But as many will attest, the road of a freelancer isn't smooth, and often not well paid. Freelancing involves A LOT of hustling, and things I've never been that comfortable with like networking, being relentless in keeping yourself in someone's mind, and endless pitching ideas, most of the time with no results.

If you are lucky enough to get an assignment there's still the chance that you'll do all the work and then it will be "not exactly what they were looking for" in which case you have to go through sometimes so much editing and re-writing that it will be like doing a second article. Other times they won't use it. If you're lucky you signed a contract with a kill fee that makes all that work still somewhat worth your time.

The other piece to freelancing is the "free" aspect. As in working for. When you write a piece either for print or the web, you typically either sign a contract (with varying degrees of giving up your rights to the work you are producing for them), send an invoice for the agreed amount, or both. Sometimes there are tax forms involved. It's all very official seeming. What never seems to be official is the when you will paid. Which is why making a living as a freelancer can sometimes be next to impossible unless you have a million different gigs going at once, or a job on the side.

I've personally never been completely stiffed (yet), but I have waited over two months for a check from an assignment, and have dealt with freelancers who have waited six months or more. Gawker did a list twice of Print's Worst Late Payment Offenders (find that here and here). Some freelancers they talked to haven't been paid in 2 YEARS!

This in two words is fucked up. A freelancer can't afford to take a publication to court over a few hundred dollars, and many don't want to burn bridges in such a competitive everyone-knows-everyone industry. The publications know this, or more likely don't care. Freelancers are of course a dime a dozen.

So here's how it's been for me: I'm currently working as a freelancer for various publications in what amounts to well over 40 hours a week, in addition, I'm still looking and applying for full time work, and I'm in the middle of applying to Grad School.

I am currently making $40 a week more than I did when I was collecting unemployment. I have no benefits. When work stops for the holidays I won’t be able to collect either. When I have my wisdom tooth removed in a month, not only will I lose money by not working (the result of no sick time) but since the health insurance that I pay out of pocket for every month doesn't cover the full procedure, I will owe more than I make in two weeks of work. And I'm lucky. I'm working. I'm single, I can afford life’s necessities, I don’t have chronic or serious medical problems, and I am not unskilled. Things are a lot worse for a lot of people in America right now.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not horribly horribly flawed. Work should be rewarded with a living wage, and medical issues like an exposed sinus from an extracted wisdom tooth should be considered an essential and covered expense.

Just saying.

No results

Conde Nast the holy grail of glossy enviable magazine jobs, folded four of it's magazines this week, after closing two others earlier this year. For many in publishing trouble at Conde is a sign that things are really truly awful and don't look like they'll get better anytime soon. Another sign? This result in my job hunt today:

Job Search Results

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Never Forget to Remember

While they say tragedy +time= comedy, there appears to be no such formula to figure out exactly how long is appropriate before it’s OK to joke about things. If there was it might be something like this:

Cultural impact of tragedy - amount of time that has passed = risk of “too soon” reaction.

Some examples:

Michael Jackson’s Death: Gave the World Thriller, but maybe molested young boys, happened 3 months ago= too late, most of the MJ jokes happened within the first week of his death and weren’t funny.

AIDS kills millions of people, but is no longer as big of a scare for middle and upper class people, and has been around for nearly 30 years. So an AIDS joke, while maybe not always in good taste, if done well is probably safe.

But what about 9/11? Less than 3,000 people died, eight years ago…. While people might not be ready to laugh about it, I do think it’s time we move on at least somewhat. After all, is suspending all other news coverage for a memorial service once a year a healthy thing as a nation? Is repeatedly wrapping ourselves up in mourning and tragedy productive? Is the constant coverage every year out of a sense of obligation, or just lazy journalism? A National Day of Service? A useful and noble idea. Not being able to get any other news once a year? The terrorists have won.

What I learned during my time as a magazine editor

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of July 2009, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 9.4%. (14.5 million people) Of that, almost tens of thousands of print journalists have found themselves out of work in 2009; well…add one more to that number.

In light of all this, it is of course it’s spectacular thing that I was laid off on last month. To me however, it is. I’m now competing for work with more talented and experienced journalists than the population of the town I grew up in, in what is probably the absolute worst time to be an unemployed print journalist.

Losing a job you love is like a bad break up. Except I was at this job longer than I’ve ever managed to hold onto any boyfriend I’ve had, and unlike after a break-up I can’t just swear off working for awhile.

Much like a relationship gone sour however, I’m looking for a lesson to be learned from all this. Is it, as so many are prone to say, a blessing in disguise? Should I serve as a cautionary tale for hopeful young journalism students? I worked extremely hard to get where I was, and worked extremely hard while I was there, to the praise of my bosses and co-workers. So what is this other than another unremarkable sob story? What did I learn during my nearly three years as a magazine editor?

1) I 1)It’s at all not as glamorous as TV and movies make it out to be, and that’s a good thing. And newsflash, living in NYC is nothing like Sex in the City or Friends. Maybe it is for some people, and it can have glamorous moments, sure. The swag is nice, press conferences and events can range from fun to unbearable. There’s a lot of smoozing and contact/relationship building, but really it’s not that much different from a million other offices. And really at the end of the day, I wouldn't want to work in an enviorment of impossible standards, lies, and snobery.

2) 2)Despite it all I refuse to believe that print dead or dying. Just like a tween, it’s in an awkward in-between phase. It’s not news that print media has been woefully behind on getting online, and still very few are doing it well. But they will, they have to, and even though a lot of magazines are folding their print publications and going online only, I don’t think people are ever going to stop reading things on paper.

3) 3)I don’t want to work in PR. Not that I ever thought I did, but man does the job suck. It’s like asking someone on a date and they keep saying no, but you have to keep asking. And the person you are asking out keeps wanting free stuff. That and I've never been able to just bestow the virutes of a product while overlooking its fallacies.

4) 4)Freelancing is harder than working full time. Now that trying my hand at freelancing more seriously than I ever had before I’m realizing how much effort it takes, writing, pitching, and still getting turned down (and most of the time it doesn't pay as well as having a full time job). As with almost everything it seems a lot more who you know rather what you know. As a magazine editor I know how many random pitches publications receive and how many they reject, sometimes with any acknowledgement. That and you never know when you’ll see the check once you do get work.

So I’ve been out of a job for a month now (for the first time in my life) and I’ve learned that it’s a bigger blow than I would have expected. And I’ve learned that I have to do all the things I’ve always hated: networking, asking for help and favors, shameless self promotion. I’ve yet to sleep in on a weekday, I’ve been working harder than I was when I had a full time job, but I’ve been also been taking one day a week to enjoy life, go to museums, parks, not be in my apartment in front of my laptop all the time. I’m not doing as poorly as I thought I would.

So what’s next? I’m really not sure, I know I’m not ready to give up on this print journalism thing. I know, at least I should start blogging more and maybe make this thing more cohesive. So there’s that upswing….

I think it might catch on

28-years ago some newspapers were discovering a new way to reach readers…the Internet. There were a lot of kinks to work out, they weren’t making money from it, in fact they were losing it…but something told these editors that this new medium might someday be how people got the news.




Some things never change.

Things I’ve thought about this Week

I’ve thought about writing about several things this week, but didn’t have enough to say about any of them to warrant their own post. So here they are in a convenient “listicle”:

• As if people needed more forums on the internets to whine, there is a site called angryjournalist.com. Sometimes though, they make a point…the best I saw: “If you got a journalism degree, you probably don’t even know how to spell obituary nevermind write one.”

• Speaking of spelling, to know me is to know my spelling anxieties, and my creative methods of getting around my dyslexic shortcomings (i.e. looking up synonyms of words I want to use in order to find how to spell them because even spell-check doesn’t know what I’m trying to say.) Truly, my poor spelling is one of the things I am most self-conscious about. Imagine then my horror last Saturday night when I was forced on stage during 30 plays in 60 minutes to participate in a Spelling Bee! I lost of course. And was told “ You have to decide if losing this means that you are a loser for this moment, or if you will be a loser for life.” How about a little from A and a little from B?

• I have found pretty much everyone to be mildly to highly annoying in recent weeks. Top honors to these “anti-sprawl arsonists/activists” though, way take a worthy cause (anti-sprawl and environmentalism) and get it completely f-ing wrong. Burning “green” houses to make a point about conservation? Well done.

• I am completely over Obama-fever. In fact, I am over the presidential primaries all together, they reached the oversaturation point a month or two ago, yet still managed to hold my attention. Until now. Seriously, I don’t care if Bill and Hillary took a walk in the park or if Obama is now using the word “transformative” instead of “change”. I’m just over it. For now. At this point, I’m voting for Nader. Also, wil.i.am? The first video was cheesy, but sure, inspiring. The second video? the chanting is kind of creepy, and um, really why don’t you just sleep with him and get it over with already, he’s going to need a restraining order if you keep up this kind of fawning.

• Despite myself, I don’t hate Ellen Page as much anymore. I watched Hard Candy last weekend and was quite impressed with her performance. I think that maybe all the hype about her in Juno was because people wished they made bigger deal out of her in Hard Candy, but torturing a pedophile isn’t as mass market friendly as an emotionally unconvincing poorly written pregnant high schooler. Plus she made fun of the lame Juno dialog during her SNL monologue, and for that I am grateful.


• And finally, this week I’ve been mildly obsessed with Songza

All I need to know about life, I didn’t learn in J-school

My journalism professors in college liked to keep it real, sometimes painfully so. The following is just some of the advice I was given during my time in J-school:

1) Journalists are poor. In fact, if you want to make money, pretty much any degree-based career choice is more lucrative.
2) Speaking of college degrees, you don’t need one. Yeah, that’s right the people getting paid to teach me were telling me that I didn’t need the education I was getting.
3) If you get good grades, no one will want to hire you. The logic here being that if you had time to pull all A’s then you weren’t doing enough actual journalism (interning, writing for the college paper, etc)
4) Whatever you do, don’t go to grad school. This came from my favorite professor, she held a PHD in Journalism and said that going to grad school for journalism was a waste of time.
5) Newsrooms are pretty laid back places, and journalists are notorious for their lack of fashion sense.

Were they right? Well kind of. If you believe the New York Times Style section (and you also believe the definition of journalist is white middle aged man who works at Vogue) then my professors were waaaaay off. These dudes are balling! ($5,000 outfit? Well that dispels #5!)
(one such journalist is pictured above- hey buddy, nice shoes..)

If however, you are more a fan of reality, then my professors were right on the (lack of) money. Even payscale.com is thinks we make more than we do

As for the degree and grades, again kind of. I doubt my A’s ever got me a job, but I’m sure they didn’t hurt, and as for the journalism degree, it’s true that a lot of the journalists and editors I’ve meant didn’t major in journalism, but I’ve never regretted learning about AP style or practicing reporting by being forced to go to court.

Finally, are newsrooms laid back? In my experience, no more than anywhere else. True, I can wear jeans to work at the magazine now, but I could wear jeans when I worked at a mortgage company and those people aren’t really known to be cool. In fact the EIC of one of the newspapers I briefly worked at in Michigan forced the men to wear ties and the women to wear pantyhose. So it really depends. Although, this piece about newsroom swearing is amusing.

Oh and grad school? I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now.

Squandering 'Merica

Tuesday morning I found myself voluntarily doing two things that normally would sound like a punishment: 1) working out on the elliptical machine before 8am and 2) watching CSPAN. As it turned it out, it was actually kind of enjoyable, if not interesting.

Robert Kuttner was on talking about his new book The Squandering of America, and I actually found myself interested in the trends of the economy. Especially when he started talking about the widening economical inequality in ‘merica and the effects on the struggles of the adult children of the working class to have social mobility.

I don’t know anything about the host, so I could be completly off, but she seemed like an uncomfortable closet conservative that wanted to give him a piece of her mind but couldn’t so she read a section for this awfully shallow researched politically biased editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

The entire basis for the editorial is a study from the (Republican) Treasury Department that basically says “Don’t worry, everything is great! Poor people aren’t poor anymore. In fact if anyone is losing money it’s rich people. Really it’s true, look at this totally scientific and non-bias information that we have gathered.”

Except for even glancing at the editorial there are enough holes for all of the 96,000 tax filers they examined to drive trucks though.

Here are just a few:

1) The tax returns that they looked at were for people over 25 years old, did they take into account how many of those people were single in 1996 and married in 2005 when they looked again? Did it compensate for the taxpayer having a two income instead of one income household?
2) Saying a percent as small as 24% over 10 years is “impressive” is stretching it more than a little bit.
3) It only accounts for what people earned not what they spent or lost, you know things like foreclosures, medical bills, etc. The kind of thing that poor people often have to worry about and rich people don’t.
4) You only have to file a tax return if you make over something like $10,000/year. Hows about doing a study of all the people so broke that they don’t even file their taxes?
5) They use the word “hokum.” Seriously.
6) It doesn’t account in what people have to do to earn this huge 24% more- say working more hours or more than one job. ( And it says “those who start at the bottom but have full time jobs” what about those who have to work two or more part time jobs because they can’t get a full time job and also have to live without benefits)
7) They use all of this to say that rich people aren’t getting richer, and that if there are more taxes it would hold back “regular people” from climbing the income ladder. Surely this wouldn’t be just a scapegoat for the 1% that already owns 90% of the country’s wealth and is afraid to loose even a tiny bit to those dirty poors…

Remembering Newspapers

Yet another post about my obsession about the state of print journalism.

Jack Lessenberry, a columnist for Metro Times Detroit (where a slightly younger, more idealistic version of me once interned) wrote this week about a Detroit newspaper editor and ownership shift that I am too young/too lazy to have paid much attention too. In his column however, he does sum up pretty succinctly what I have been trying to say about the tends in both newspapers and magazines:

"Newspaper companies, not just those in Detroit, seem to have made a decision to publish newspapers for people who do not like to read. They are putting out papers for those who would rather watch television.

That might have made some sense in somebody's head at some cocktail party somewhere, but I can report I have talked to actual humans who prefer watching television to reading. Talked to them at length, in fact. The truth is that they don't want a newspaper that looks like television. They just don't want to read, period. People who do want to read find increasingly less and less in newspapers in general."

He goes on to talk about how since newspapers have been trying to be TV they have lost readers in larger numbers and it is because of this not solely advances in technology that newspapers are dying.

The more and more the evil corporate chains buy up papers, the fewer publications escape the infotainment trap. Even those who seem to can get sucked in, the summer that I interned at Metro Times (2003) I sat in on a meeting with the local fox station about how we could partner with their morning broadcasts to promote our stories. Luckily they editors were all left with such a bad taste and the broadcasters didn't seem too keen on the story about gay bath houses in Detroit. The partnership, to my knowledge never took place.

Update (4/19): Mother Jones decided to send me two issues at once, so I've been busy reading the March/April issue in the last few days and every article in it is really good this time around. This one: Breaking the News, kind of says it all on this topic though.

"dead tree media"

I didn't read this whole article, because really how many pages can you read about an office move?

But I did read it long enough to:

1. feel nostalgic for an era of print journalism in which I have never worked

and

2. want to vomit a little over the use of "mod cons" in place of modern conveniences.


Number two basically explains its self and if I wasn't so lazy I would write the editor who let the phrase slide a stern email.

But let me if you will expand on number one a bit more: I think journalism is an exciting and necessary profession (which you know is luckily since I happen to be in it). Despite my formal training and short time at daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, and ugh, a company newsletter, I would be woefully prepared to be a reporter in a time even as short as 15 years ago.

Sure, I typed my high school papers on a broken typewriter, didn't use email or the interweb until late 1999, and am still far less tech savvy than many in the field, but I've also worked in offices when the computers have gone down and everyone sat there helpless and uncomfortable, me very much included.

Is it ironic that I am a print journalist, who gets 95% of her news online or on TV, who wants very much for the old traditions not to die, yet increasingly works on the interweb side of the media and would be hard pressed to research a story without a computer?

Don't ask me I learned irony from Alanis Morissette.

What We Call the News

What we call the news indeed.

Dark Days in Journalism

I get so annoyed with mass media so often ( I've always been annoyed with much of broadcast journalism, but in the last couple of years print and internet journalism have been veering so much towards tabloid "infotainment" that they are not much better if not worse).

Case in point: Mary Kate f*cking Olsen can now write for The New York Times Ok, granted it is in the style magazine, not the news section or anything and it is about purses, but still. I'm sure they are more informed voices and journalists who might have something more interesting to say than "I like my red Chanel bag the best." Journalists who worked their whole careers to get a Times byline can take solace in the fact that a 20 year old child star got there before them.

The direction that journalism seems to be taking in this country isn't the most disheartening however, the fact that something like this is still happening in the world. Journalists being jailed, tortured and even murdered is nothing new, but there are several things that are especially disturbing about this: The underwhelming reactions to not only his conviction but the fact that prison sentences for journalists had allegedly been abolished in Egypt. And the lukewarm threats: "you shouldn't be able to host a fourm in two years now" oooh, that will show them..

All of this in addition to the hundreds of media jobs that have been cut in New York in the last couple of months- it's all almost enough to make a person lose their wide-eyed idealism. Almost.