Burnout in journalism

Said the same to the desk which I oversaw when I was unceremoniously dumped. And I urged them to update their resumes.

Said a lot that the top editor knew what I said, didn't throw me out on the spot and acknowledged what I said.

 

No. 1 piece of advice I received, early in my newspaper career: "The paper will come out without you."

(No. 1A: "Writer's block? Stuck trying to write a headline? Lower your standards.")

 

Amen to both but especially the first. If you’re sick you’re sick. Be sick. Don’t work. And, no, it is not your colleague’s business what you were sick with. (It might be your boss’s.)

And if it’s your day off it’s your day off. Take it. Something happens, someone else has it or they don’t but it’s not you.

And of course do your work. Help as needed - others help you as needed - but, if they aren’t paying you to have a columnist’s opinion on something, don’t have it. Learn to love your lane.

 

Well said.

 

Nobody truly gets a day off on the sports staffs anymore. If news happens you will write it or be disciplined in many places. And the 40 hour work week is laughable. If one covers a pro team it's 70 minimum. "You are lucky to have a job," is today's mantra.

 

In theory, yes. Of course, yes. But the expectation to be on standby for news 24/7 is rampant. Every beat I’ve covered at shops big and small — you bet, I was working on my days off. It’s a widespread problem, even in union gigs, that I don’t see as having an easy fix anytime soon.

 

We fall into the trap that we can't do anything else but being a sports writer. It's a great gig, for sure. But if it becomes too much of a burden, nobody makes enough to put up with this industry's BS.

 

I'm 55. Done the daily pressure-filled gig.

For the past two years, I've worked for a small chain of weeklies. The publisher allows me to do the Charles Kuralt-type thing and find human interest stories. Some of those involve sports.

I love it. I feel lucky, and I guess I am. Not making much money, mind you, but still love the freedom.

 

Bless your heart. Sounds like a great job cept for the $$s. Can you put food on the table?

 

This is such an alien concept in journo-world one wouldn't think the grass is truly greener on the other side.

 

Ex-New York Times Styles editor says he suffered from burnout, wished for death

 

This has been a "churn and burn" industry since well before my 40 years. There have been J-schools graduating tens of thousands of starry-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears media folks aiming to be the next Cronkite, Woodward or Bernstein every June for decades -- and only so many places to land where you weren't already well below the poverty line.

Before automation (and FCC deregulation), somebody had to push the buttons in places like Ocala, Melbourne, Napa and Vacaville, Sacramento and Raleigh. And I figured it might as well be me.

In 1979, I was informed by my senior seminar professor that the MEDIAN annual salary in radio was $8,400 and the average career lasted 2.1 years before the starving masses wised up and got real jobs. At the national Radio and Television News Directions Association meeting in San Francisco in 1987, one of the seminars was "Life After Radio News" because fewer than 50 of the 1,000-plus attendees were over 30 years of age and still employed. I lasted another three years. But to my credit, I never flacked out.

And I'm guessing my compatriots on the print side were seeing the same thing happen, only in slower train-wreck motion. Newspapers somehow kept the doors open through huge jumps in the cost of newsprint -- even as far back as the early 1970s -- and no matter how they resized the newshole, merged to cut costs and salaries, I can't see a way they will be able to pull out of the death spiral caused by the one-two punch of classified ads and circulation.

I should have taken the hint, but being stubborn and stupid, I just jumped from radio's frying pan into print's fire, then into the ashes of the first Internet implosion.

Don't let Grammerly be the only way business people figure out what they missed when they slept through fifth grade English. You have unique skills that corporations actually need. They just don't know where to look.