Tension at The Washington Post

Speaking as an alt-weekly alum, you couldn't be more accurate.

 

Felicia Sonmez Is Fired by The Washington Post - The New York Times

 

The fact that a Washington Post reporter who isn't Woodward or Bernstein is known enough to have their name in a headline says a lot about the industry today. We're not the story, etc.

 

How has the Left let it get to this?

 

I hope it went down like this:

“You know what? You're fired. Get your shit out of here. You've got 10 minutes.”

 

The definition of 'professionalism' has changed a lot. So have journalists.

And the idea that journalists build a personal online brand was a favorite of the bosses for years. All of whom considered only the clicks. Clickclickclick.

But that meant all the internecine bullshit that used to happen in the newsroom or at The Billy Goat or in the Press Club parking lot or on Michael's altweekly media page moved online, too. Dean Baquet et al learned that lesson the hard way.

Governing 100% of employee conduct on social media is impossible. Rather, bosses have to figure how to harness all that energy to the betterment of the company.

So Sonmez - like Bari Weiss and others at the Times - takes the paper's discontents online. Now what? You can't applaud one and condemn the other.

Does anyone here disagree with the idea that there's a double standard in every newsroom regarding who gets called out for their bullshit and who doesn't? And that some of those differences are ageist or sexist or racist?

Good luck, bosses.

 

Can you imagine Times employees live tweeting this?

Hell, no, Howell won't go: Times Executives Feel Blair's Burn

 

Its been my experience that the loudest of the Twitter crowd don’t actually generate the clicks you’d think they would. Those that follow such types want the drama, they consume the dunks and sick burns, they don’t click links.

 

Like paywalls, pivots to video, and premium streaming - I give you CNN+ ! - legacy media bosses have been wrong about a lot.

A lot.

 

I'll add this:

a great deal of the tension here is between a leadership generation who came of age without social media and an employee generation who swam in it from the time they were kids.

And activism is one of the things social media do(es) best, so it's an accelerant of and for institutional grievance and discontent.

 

I would like to think the pendulum is starting to swing back toward quality, but you could argue the web destroyed our civil society and common bonds in the process. What’s happening now with “fake news” is partly the byproduct of 30 years of reduced news coverage and fragmentation of our society.

Let me point to top-40 radio as an example. In the 1960s, WABC or WIP or your local version would play everything. It might have been surrounded by lots of commercials, but there was a shared experience and a top DJ in every town. Nowadays music is so fractured that stations are programming for niches of niches.

 

Maybe I don't know what professionalism is anymore, but I sure as hell know what it ain't. And when your bosses and your colleagues (emphasis on the plural) are telling you to knock it off and your first reaction is to clap back* on Twitter ... you're neck deep in the "ain't" pool.


*See ... I can be hip!