Do you read your newspaper?

I read maybe one or two articles but most of the stuff in the newspaper is not very interesting and old news.

 

That's why I just look at the pictures.

 

Fuuuuck no.

Our paper was never any great shakes in the news department, and it's gotten much worse under our parasitic cannibalistic management, which operates the entire publication as a cow to be milked, as well as to pander to the masses with greasy grimy gobs of blood and guts, and heaping helpings of tits and ass.

Nobody's interested in actually doing a professional-quality job; they're just worried about surviving one more day until the axeman makes his next visit.

As far as learning anything in a literary sense, don't be absurd. Nobody else at our joint, as a writer, is worthy to clean out the cracker crumbs from my keyboard. I look at their shit, and it's shit like I was putting out in, uhhh, about 7th or 8th grade.

 

... and that's the happy faction of our brethren.

 

When working for a major metro, I loved reading the paper. I knew I was the weak link on the team, so reading the paper did nothing but help. But at my last joint, reading shit in our paper where the writer constantly had errors in his lede, I just gave up.

 

i read it online, which doesn't make much sense because it's delivered to my door step every day and laying around the office

 

Maybe it's because I'm still young, but because I freelance for (two) monthlys, I count down the days when the finished product hits newstands!

 

If you want to get past the feature retreads that pass for "enterprise" these days, read the whole paper and think about the sports implications... when communities change, the ripples hit your world in sports, and if you notice before the ME does then you'll look smart.

example: tornado/tropical storm/weather crisis hits small town. When is the next game? Often the teams/games are a microcosm of how the community is surviving.

example: overcrowding in schools leads to school expansion. a new high school is built. how will the traditions -- the mascot, school colors, fight song -- get started? there's never a homecoming game the first season.

example: two big universities you cover during football season have the same off Saturday. churches are packed because everyone wants to get married without a conflict with their favorite team and game traffic.

stretch your horizons people!! too much of sports writing is the same predictable who won, who lost bs.

and don't bitch about declining readership if you can't be bothered with anything but your own section.

 

At the last place I worked, I could burn through the A section in 5 minutes or less every night. I read the 1A stories of interest (usually 2 on a good day), the editorial page, maybe the calendar of events if I had some days off coming up. But hell no, I'm not going to slog through little Suzy winning the spelling bee, or the Podunk airport authority naming a new vice president. The wire stories were stuff I read during slow times on the shift anyway, and they were always chopped to shit in the print edition. If I truly wanted to know what was happening anywhere that was a long distance call away, I had to read the Big Metro (which I usually did 3-6 times a week).