For those who've left the biz

I've been gone from OCR for about 5 months. I still read it online and get the paper delivered. It usually goes right into the recycle bin.
I want my friends and former co-workers there to succeed.
It has been difficult to NOT copyedit the stories I read. A lot of fine-tuning I did to make the pages look better is not being done, but there are fewer people there and none with the experience I had.
They moved up the deadlines during OCR's delivery fiasco and I was going to quit next time the bill came due if they couldn't get normal 7 or 7:30 p.m. games into the paper. But I heard they have pushed the deadlines back. We'll see.

 

I see how bad the coverage has gotten and I feel bad for the one person who I worked with who is still there. Everybody else was let go or left on their own. The guy who is still there is tremendous, but the others, for the most part, are pretty awful. To be fair, they're being asked to do things that they don't know how to do.

The other thing that is tough to see is all of the errors. Nothing is being edited. I doubt people are even running spell check.

The final edition frequently resembles a what a first edition would look like on a night when everything went wrong.

It's really sad.

 

I read my old paper online just about every day, but usually only because I am still interested in those teams and coaches I used to cover. There are a few coaches and ADs I worked with who I root for because I know they are good people and always treated me well.

The staff only has one person still on it from when I was there, so I don't have the whole "rooting for former colleagues" thing. It is a shell of what it once was. That sucks to see.

 

I'm completely with you on that.

My parents remain subscribers to the dead-tree version, so I use their name and address and my email address to read the online version for free.

 

I'm out of the biz on my own accord, but every shop I left I continued to follow what they did for a long time, almost obsessively. Even my college paper fro a good while after I graduated. But it will wear out. I guess some of it depends on how much of a connection you still have at a place. I've not really made it a point to go to anything at a former workplace on my own for a long time now (out of the biz for six-plus years), but I do have friends and other connections at every place I've been. So there may be something that pops up from time to time that I look in on or communicate with people about. That's it. Definitely not a daily thing, though. That's long passed.

 

That's the rub. I can be pretty bitter about how management incompetence has caused a lot of problems, but I can't turn my back on the many friends I made over 25 years. Along those lines, I routinely call in to the desk to tell them about corrections they need to make. In fact, just did that a few minutes ago. I could be spiteful and just laugh about the errors, but in the end that would diminish me as much as them.

 

I'm the same way with my online and three-days-a-week subscriptions. Crazy as it sounds, I keep thinking that by reading the paper, maybe I can help a few longtime friends keep their jobs just a little longer. I don't point out things that need to be fixed, though -- most of my friends there already have to put up with a lot of "feedback" from unrealistic bosses.

 

I understand worrying for old friends, but it's like with an ex-girlfriend/spouse- there's no point tracking where it goes after you're done.

 

I'm buddies with the guy that took over my beat after I left and I've read some of his stuff, but that's about it. Truthfully, I didn't read the paper all that much in my last year or so there.

 

I don't read it, but Schieza - who's also no longer there - provides me with some funny highlights when the paper comes out. It went from being the best section in the area, maybe the state, to a total disaster. The poor kid who's essentially new me has no social skills and doesn't talk to any of the kids, just the coaches. The writing is a disaster and the design is awful.
In a headline, subhed and lede, we counted six mistakes, including spelling the host school of the state track meet wrong in the subhed and then spelling it wrong a different way in the dateline, not to mention that the school isn't a dateline because it's an area high school and not an actual place.
Part of me wishes I could go back and rescue the thing, but the people in charge have their heads so far up their asses I know I couldn't - and they wouldn't want me anyway.

 

Funny this topic comes up now, as Sunday was the four year anniversary of me being tossed from this business. When I was first let go, I read it like a hawk, scouring for any minor error of misspelling I could find. I took a sadistic glee in seeing a story from my old beat written by my former editor, which called a source by their wrong name throughout. Considering they were using an alibi for releasing me was repeated mistakes made by me I considered this karma.

As time wore on I got involved with working on other things and realized they'd done me a favor by brooming me. if I read it now it's to be informed and not nitpick. That editor who jacked up my the name? We're facebook friends again, and she was one of the first to congratulate when a screenplay idea of my was selected as a finalist in a writing contest.

So, I guess my answer is, yeah, sometimes.

 

The opposite take is those of us still in it, where ex-employees are still around. For months, the previous SE, who I liked a lot, would text me about errors he found in the paper. And because he still strings for various other papers when he can, I do run into him at some games. Earlier this year in a pressbox he went on a little rant about how things aren't the same at the paper. He doesn't like the way the new SE is covering stuff, doesn't like the different writing and layout styles and wonders why we have cut back on our coverage.
Sorry dude, I appreciate the passion for the paper, but you're gone. Even if I agree, you're chatting up the wrong person.