Extra! Extra!

Ahoy there. You probably know: baby on board. You may have found yourself wondering: will Yalestar.com &emdash;my one-stop source for amateurish social satire singalongs&emdash; soon become nothing more than a repository of endless and tiresome "...and then little Olivia did this and that" yarns? Never fear, Earth Warrior. I've decreed that I will sully these pages with that sort of gooey cuteness as little as humanly possible.

To that end, and while I figure out how the hell I'm going to set about earning my "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug, I've enlisted my old friend Sarah to step in. I'd no sooner given her the go-ahead to grease up her Selectric than she had returned with the following prolific account of her newspapering career:

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Extra! Extra! Working for newspapers sucks ass

Hello, Yalestar readers. My name is Sarah, and some of you may remember me from my booze-soaked days in Missoula; others may have just met me at Andy's wedding/bachelor party. Whether you knew me from before or not, allow me to tell you about my New Life, which includes a significant re-hashing of my Old Life. I recently made the career jump from the world of journalism to the world of politics. Not just politics, but the p.r. flack, propaganda-creation arm of politics. That's right&emdash;I work in Democratic Communications for my state's House of Representatives, and I couldn't be happier. So refresh your beverage and settle in&emdash;she's a long one!

Perhaps you've seen the movie "Joe Vs. the Volcano." You know how in the beginning, he worked in that horrible, nauseatingly lit, cheerless office? That was me, until very recently. For four years, I toiled away endlessly in the "word mine" of a daily corporate-owned newspaper because it was one of the only paying newspaper job in town. Now some of you may be saying, "Well, that sure beats working at the Quickie Mart," and that may be true. But I can tell you the main reason why all but the most cosmopolitan media products in this nation completely suck: Because most of the people working in newsrooms are miserable, maladjusted misanthropes whose precarious mental states are made worse by the piss-poor way they're treated by their managers and the company that owns them.

In the old days, newshounds would simply self-medicate with flasks tucked inside their desks. They would chain-smoke as they hammered out stories on their electric typewriters. They would roam the city, turning a jaundiced eye toward any and all malfeasance. They worked hard and played hard, with the understanding that most of their co-workers (and boss) would also be hung over the next morning. But then, sometime in the 1990s, motherfuckers got soft. Everyone moved to the suburbs and lost their flavor. Nobody socialized after work because they had to get to daycare to pick up their kids. Forget weekends&emdash;that was prime time for the massive retail stampede. Oh, there are still a few rogues lurking about in your average newsroom, like the sports reporters at my paper (Sports sections being the last bastion of newsroom rebellion) who got fired for calling Vegas from work with daily bets on the ballgames. Or the woman who wrote a novel entirely while on the clock.

I'll admit, I was never one of those Brenda Starr types who spent her childhood dreaming of working for the Daily Planet. In high school, I was too busy smoking cigarettes on The Hill with greasy dudes in Pantera t-shirts to worry about any boring extracurricular activities such as the school newspaper. I had always liked to write, but I thought the do-gooders working on the newspaper, year book and Soliloquy&emdash;our student "poetry" publication&emdash;were a bunch of self-important arseholes. Fuck 'em, I thought&emdash;let's get the Papa John's pizza guys to sell us a pinner and call it an afternoon.

Fast forward to college. I tried to figure out what to do with my life. After some introspection, I realized there were only two talents I had: Drinking, and an uncanny ability overhear gossip and ferret out scandalous information. How in the hell could I combine these "gifts" into something meaningful and one day be paid money for it? Ah, yes. I'd become a reporter!

My eagerness to become Super Scoop quickly faded. I detested my fellow University of Montana J-School colleagues except for a handful of people. Talk about self-important! The professors were complete dicks who thought that two years at the Two-Dot Herald made them Bob Fucking Woodward. They ran our dean, a former senior editor from the Wall Street Journal, out of town for being too radical (read: innovative). The faculty had a pack mentality and cultivated a "star" system, which made the students so competitive that they would never, ever tell you if they liked something you did. I should have realized right there I was experiencing a glimpse of what my future in the news-gathering industry would hold.

But then I got a job with The Independent, which was a fucking awesome place to work. On my first day, I opened the desk I was assigned to and discovered a Day-Glo condom (unused) and a roach. And we held meetings at Flipper's! I learned so much and experienced total camaraderie with my co-staffers. Finally, the creative community I had longed to be a part of in college.

After a few years at the Indy, I ended up moving back to my hometown in the heart of America's Rustbelt&emdash;definitely not the home of progressive, alt weekly newspapers. After a few months, I managed to b.s. my way into a copy editing job at our city's daily newspaper. At first, I was so dazzled by the slight pay raise that I didn't care about anything else. What, they use'80s-era terminals with the ATEX system instead of Macs or even PCs? No problem, I'll learn! You have to pay for coffee out of the office urn? OK, I'll remember to bring my quarters. No cigarette breaks? Well, I should quit anyway. No paid lunch hour? No overtime? No union? No feedback on my work except during mean-spirited, nitpicky, once-a-year performance reviews? And I have to work Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and most every other holiday, because, well, the newspaper goes out every day regardless of the fact that everyfuckingbody else on the planet has the day off? And the building is ice-cold in the winter and colder in the summer, and when we try to plug in a space heater, it blows every computer in the room?

Well, shit, after a while I began to feel like I had taken a job in a Ukranian herring factory. And this was a newspaper owned by the wealthiest media conglomerate in the United States! If all that wasn't bad enough, I was working in a room roughly 15' by 10' with seven other people. It was impossible to have a private phone conversation. It was nearly impossible to visit a non-work-related Web site such as Yalestar. I would have to time my Web surfing for when my section editor was in his morning meeting, which lasted roughly 20 minutes.
So there I was, working in this tight, stuffy, freezing, neon-lit hole in the wall that smelled like an old school&emdash;which was bad enough. Then I slowly started to realize that almost everybody else in the room was completely insane.
To wit:

1) Section editor: Almost got fired for fucking this chick from the "back shop" (before the paper was electronically paginated) in the basement, during his shift, while his wife was at home with their two kids, fighting a losing battle with breast cancer. He was barely able to hide his racist/sexist leanings. And he's the one in charge.

2) Arts and Entertainment editor: Somehow a syndicated TV critic, despite being one of the most formulaic hacks ever to set words to the page. ONLY eats Cheerios and Saltines and will ONLY drink a mix of Diet Coke and Cherry Kool-Aid. Will attend weddings, but not wedding receptions. To his credit, was often referred to as "The Machine" for being a very hard worker. And was a nice man once you got to know him, though that took a few years.

3) Features Reporter: Former Metro Editor lured from the East Coast with a huge salary who was later bumped down to features after it became clear she was incapable of running a section. During her Metro tenure, she used to take the paper an hour before it was supposed to hit the presses and completely re-write the top stories. Never sat down; never appeared to eat. Then got on heavy meds and moved to my section, got her nose pierced and started dressing like her 14-year-old daughter. Who shops at Hot Topic. Seriously.

4) Assistant Editor: Seemed OK at first, but then started writing (super snotty) movie and (one-dimensional) dining reviews and let it go completely to her head. (See "Simpsons" episode #229&emdash;"It was not undelicious!") You couldn't tell her shit. Then she scandalized the entire paper by dumping her husband of seven years with no warning for the new Metro Editor&emdash;who is a woman. I kid you not: They fell in love after traveling across country to attend an Indigo Girls concert.

5) Copy Editor: Perhaps the single most annoying, self-absorbed, manipulative person I have had the bad fortune to know in my entire life. Totally insufferable. Former stripper. Refused to admit when she made a mistake yet relentlessly and patronizingly pointed out even the most microscopic errors of others. In the four years I was there, went from a baby-talking, spike-heel-and-miniskirt-wearing Elizabeth Wurtzel-style "I'm a bitch and proud of it, and I only date guys who pay for everything and send me flowers on our two-week anniversary" bimbo to a married Catholic conservative/reality TV fanatic who would shush us when we tried to discuss the least little political thing because she didn't want her ears poisoned with Anti-Values ideas. Spent work day after work day posting to various chat rooms (Right to Life, Natural Family Planning, Rate My Kitten (no fucking joke), In Celebration of Long Hair, How Big Is Your Diamond, etc.) and then pretended she was too busy to help proof pages. After one of her husband's closest friends murdered somebody and then shot himself in the head afterward, she complained how rude it was that shooter's family mentioned her husband in the obituary but not her. In her slut days, used to show up to work the morning after she went on a date with some cheesy junior businessman wearing the same skirt as the day before and his Oxford shirt tied Daisy Duke-style at her waist.

And these are just the people in my little department. I won't even go into the story of our librarian, who kept her dead dog in the refrigerator&emdash;along with all her food&emdash;until she could take it to the vet's office a few days later for cremation.

Plus, twice a year, the entire building staff would have to file across the street into a local performing arts theater for the State of the Company address, which was always guaranteed to be utter horseshit. The publisher would pace back and forth on the stage and berate us with an impeccably rehearsed [insert joke here] speech. The advertising automatons would guffaw at his pathetic attempts at humor and break out into "spontaneous" applause. [Side note: Look at any newspaper's parking lot, and you'll see an even mix of 5-to 10-year-old beaters and gleaming new SUVs and such. Guess who usually drives the new cars? The people who work in advertising. The pay disparity between them and reporters is a constant source of low-level but everpresent resentment.]

Raises were set at a 2 percent cost-of-living rate per year unless your file demonstrates you have gone "above and beyond the call of duty." My company cut all retirement health benefits for employees under the age of 35 last year, regardless of whether you end up giving them 30 years of your working life or not. And you are not allowed to publicly voice a political opinion about anything. Say they want to bulldoze your neighborhood and put in a Wal-Mart. You can't sign the petition against it. Your neighbor is running for school board and you know she'd do a damn good job. "Sorry&emdash;no signs in the yard." Your spouse wants to support his brother, who is running for office. You can't, and neither can he. "You can't show bias. Hey, you knew what you were getting into when you joined this profession. In fact, some of us think you shouldn't even cast a vote for anything or anybody." In essence, don't participate in your community. And people wonder why newspapers seem so out of touch, or why the "real news" is usually missing from our local newspapers&emdash;many reporters put in their 8 hours and head home to the bubble, like most of us. Newspaper honchos make half-hearted attempts to encourage mixing with the outside world, but when your time with your family is so limited, and you have a natural tendency to resent most of the other people on the planet, and you are discouraged from participating in local politics, and you have no respect for your boss and feel shit on by management&emdash;well, you can do the math.

As you can imagine, four years of this bullshit newspaper job was long enough. Deliverance came accidentally, when I heard about a job in Democratic Communications from a friend of a friend. I sent in my resume, ran through the interview hoops and made the glorious crossing into the land of government public relations.

And here's why I joined up with the Democrats: We may be, at times, a woefully unorganized and inefficient party, but we are definitely the party of inclusion. And I'd rather have it get to cartoonist levels&emdash;such as the "Inuit Throat Singers followed by the president of the Lesbian Coalition followed by the Harlem Boys Choir" schedule at the DNC last month&emdash;than be one of those bigots who believes that the white fundamentalist Christian way of life is the only right and true way of life. Garrison Keillor wrote a great article about being a Democrat recently. Basically, he said, Democrats have agreed to accept the social contract that says you help your neighbors when they're down. Republicans tell you to fuck off, fend for yourself and keep your hands off their stash. Their whole raison d'etre is exclusion. And they play WAY dirtier than Democrats.

To paraphrase Rick James (R.I.P.), democracy is a hell of a drug. You wouldn't believe how complicated it is. But at the same time, it's all a fairly predictable game. There's no doubt some causes are way more righteous than others, and some elected officials are more sincere than others, but everybody plays the game. At first I felt like I was in a foreign country and all I knew how to do was ask for directions to the train station, especially when I was dispatched to the Capitol during the House of Representatives' legislative session. I was always under the naïve assumption that when you hear a politician speaking, or you read a quote from them in the paper, it's essentially their ideas. Wrong. Well, there are your few gifted orators such as Billy Clint and Barak Obama. But, basically, Central Staff determines the policy message, crafts boilerplate "talking points," and then we writers refine the words to fit our guy or gal's district and personality. "You need a quote for a press release? Make it up. We'll get the rep to sign off on it later. Just look at the briefing books&emdash;there you'll have all the talking points you need to be able to stay on message." It's actually kind of fun. Plus, I can be totally bombastic and partisan. After so many years of working diligently to strip any editorial leanings out of my writing, I've been bingeing like a drunken sailor on shore leave with this new gig. In fact, my boss said, "I think this is the first time I've ever had to say this to a new employee, but you might need to tone down the rhetoric a little bit."

The ultimate difference between political grunts and newspaper grunts is that political grunts generally love their work. I mean, to the point where they eat, sleep and breathe it, which can be a little annoying to a social animal such as myself. But they love to flirt. They rely on each other for help, and nobody gets an attitude about it. They drink. Most are (often shockingly) young. You're treated like an adult&emdash;part of the team&emdash;and trusted to make the call whether your schedule can accommodate a two-hour lunch or not. They want an office that is a "hive of activity." And it's some office&emdash;brand new, with a top-floor view. Five weeks of paid vacation every year. God bless America! (One thing that seems to cross party lines is the prevalence of intern-banging, or so I hear. It totally goes on, even at the lower rungs of the political food chain.)

The biggest difference for me is that I now have a job where I believe in The Goal. At the newspaper, I knew I was mainly increasing the wealth of our major stockholders at the expense of my own retirement plan. I just couldn't get with that. It's my opinion that the newspaper biz is going to continue to fall apart because these companies are so focused on the bottom line that they've essentially forgotten their employees are human beings, not copy-generating machines. And the gathering and dissemination of information is one of the most timeless, human-driven endeavors going. Thank God good folks such as Yale J. Kaul are blogging their little fingers off. Hope it takes a few more years for the media conglomerates to pimp them the way they have with the fake alt weeklies.

So to all you disgruntled newspaper people, I say&emdash;get into public relations already. It's a whole new world&emdash;one with money and open-bar events! And to all of you who are cynical about politics&emdash;it may be a flawed system, but it's still functional. So vote, goddammit. I don't care who it's for. A lot of blood has been shed in the name of voting rights for all in this nation. It's time to take that seriously like they do in other, less privileged parts of the world.

Thanks for listening,
SMS

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