Is what we do demeaning?

Sometimes, the simple joy of this job is this:

I get paid to cover sports.

It sounds silly and oversimplified, and if there's a nuclear holocaust, there's not going to be any need for me. But my life involves doing something I probably would do for free -- watching sporting events and thinking critically about them.

Some posters here say they have friends who don't understand why we would want to do what we do. My friends are the opposite. They can't understand how I get paid to go to a college football game, or an NBA basketball game that they can't even buy tickets to. We all know there is much more to our jobs than that. But from the outside looking in, it's a pretty sweet gig.

 

The posts from Hacker, lawoman, and Joe really hit home for me, since the points they raise are exactly the things that made me leave the biz. Obviously there are things that can get you down at every job, but for me, the biggest difference about a job in newspapers and a job in another line of work is that a newspaper job isolates you so much from the rest of your life that in time, it becomes your life. So if you are unhappy at work, it's difficult to leave that at the office and be happy in other aspects of your life because you have been forced to withdraw from those other aspects, like friends or family, and give yourself almost totally to the job. In the jobs I've had since leaving the biz, I am just as dedicated while I'm at the office, but when I leave the office, the work stays there and doesn't come home with me. If I had a tough day at work, that gets alleviated by the thought of a night/weekend with family or friends. When I was in newspapers, the most I could look forward to was commiserating with coworkers at last-call or watching TV alone at 4 a.m.

Sure, there are definitely times when I thought about the fact that I was being paid to cover sports, which seems to be a sweet gig, and I was even relatively satisfied with my pay. But then you think about the crappy hours, the sacrifices you have to make in your personal life to do this job, and the shoddy treatment you get from the people you cover and the people you make all those sacrifices to serve, and you can't help but wonder if it's worth it. And then there's the fact that, at least for me, covering sports ruined sports for me, in part because I got to see up close the a-holes that some of these coaches and players really are, and in part because when you're covering a game, you aren't really watching it to enjoy it. You are more worried about deadline than you are about what a classic this triple-OT thriller is turning out to be. Given all those reasons, I can totally understand someone questioning the value of what we do. Obviously I took pride in what I did, as I'm sure most journalists do, but I wonder if we are sometimes too close to and too invested in our profession to take a step back and evaluate it as we would evaluate someone else's job.

 

Yeah, see, that's not enough for me. I wish it were.

 

It seems as though you have answered your original question.

 

Not necessarily. I think that there are plenty of shades of gray to the question, and now that the cool kids got their shots in and the discussion is underway, that is being explored and I'm grateful.

 

This is huge for me. Spent a few days with my brother and his wife recently (one's a carpenter, other a secretary at law firm) and they come home tired and cranky. But then they spend their evenings and weekends together, and that is their life that really counts.

What we do, if the situation is a good one, is better than most jobs, because it taps into our passions in ways that many folks' occupations do not. But if the situation isn't good -- if you aren't working for a great boss, if your paper doesn't support superior journalism in space, manpower or budget, if you have little chance at advancement or growth or raises that reward your contributions -- then what we do can be lots worse than most jobs. Because it asks long hours, nights, weekends, travel, all compounded now by job insecurity, burgeoning workloads, bean-counting bastards as bosses and downsized staffs that hurt camaraderie. And lots more bad I won't mention (notice that I haven't said a thing about pay).

If I were working for a boss who was fighting the good fight, standing up for the journalism and his staff and for long-term thinking, I'd stick around till the bitter end. But I see bosses ducking and covering, holding onto their bonus checks, doing the owner's bidding and exploiting the "passion" and "calling" crap, and believe there's no pulling out of the nosedive now.

 

I agree with P-W here. Not all the time, but I have felt demeaned and even described it that way before. Being at the weekly press conference, where they trot in players for about 20 minutes, I sometimes feel like we're a bunch of high school kids all trying to impress the prettiest girl in school, and all getting shut down. I'm supposed to walk into this athletic department and pretend to like all these people who talk to me only because they have to? I'm supposed to sit around in a herd of other reporters wearing my little name tag, waiting until they herd us into the room to interview a 19-year-old kid who just happens to weigh 230 pounds and run fast? I'm supposed to call some high school kid and ask him if My Local School is still in his "list"?

I mean, I realize that's the job and I do it because I like sports and I like to write and I like telling stories. But when you're at, say, the NCAA Tournament, and they make an announcement regarding the upcoming "press feeding," like we're a bunch of fucking horses, how can any freethinking person not feel at least a little dehumanized?

The big moments are what keep me going in this business -- the interview nobody else got, being right, talking to the occasional real person who tells you real things, a big feature story. But the day-to-day stuff can be a real grind, unless you're some fanboy that's just excited to talk to his heroes every week, which I think is a little more common in this business than we'd like to admit (not so much among newspaper reporters, but it just seems there are an awful lot of fanboys asking fanboy questions at these press conferences I attend).

 

Rather than keep talking about the demands of the business - which are pretty well fixed in a narrow range of possibilty in the newspaper business - why don't we talk about what it is you want to get out of your career, PW? Seems to me part of the problem with this thread is that we're talking in broad generalities about problems in the system we're unlikely to solve.

For example - did you come to sports writing because you love sports? Or because you love writing?

 

I got into it, initially, because I loves sports. I discovered along the way that I loved writing and storytelling far more.

I'll expound tomorrow.

Right now, I'm a little tipsy and tired from catching the Rockies-Padres game.

 

I understand exactly what PW is talking about. Many times I've been standing in a clubhouse waiting with a bunch of other writers while some athlete slowly ate a piece of pizza, knowing he could make us wait as long as he wanted.

Just a couple of months ago a bunch of writers were standing around Barry Bonds during his HR chase. Bonds said he wasn't talking, but no one wanted to leave just in case he changed his mind, so about 15 reporters just stood there, watching him watch TV. I actually had to walk away from that crowd, even at the risk he might say something, because it seemed so pathetic.

Usually when I have these feelings, I kind of give myself a chuckle by saying something like "Gee, and I passed up medical school to do this."

Honestly, those moments are not enough to detract from the overall enjoyment I get out of the job.

 

Enjoyment is nice but when you're eating ramen five nights a week, it's difficult to find any enjoyment.
At some point you ask yourself is it worth it? Can you provide for yourself and another?
At some point you come to crossroad. That's where PW is at.

 

I have a story along that vein: Big-time local college hoops coach was rumored to be on the verge of getting fired, and we got word that he was meeting with the AD one afternoon. A handful of reporters staked out the basketball office waiting to get whatever tidbits they could from either of them as they left, knowing full well that we'll likely get nothing. The wait went on for hours, and I was even called upon on my off day to go relieve our writer who had an unavoidable obligation. We were just idling in the parking lot until around 9 p.m. The coach ended up ducking out the other side of the building and jumped into a get-away car, and later when the AD was pulling out of the parking lot, we all flocked around his car like vultures descending on carrion. And of course, he'd say nothing except chide us in the most condescending tone possible and told us to go home to our families. At which point I think somebody answered: "We don't have families because we spend all our time waiting for you."