19 Things Only Restructured Journalists Will Get
19 Things Only People In A Newsroom That's Being Restructured Will Understand
By Lyndon HoodIllustrated with GIFs chosen literally at random from replygif.net
(Reload for a new set.)If, like most of New Zealand (as far as I can tell from my Twitter stream), you work in modern journalism, you've experienced some things the rest of the world just won't get:
When you can't read your
shorthand because you were too busy collecting six kinds of
multimedia footage at the same time as trying to ask that
question about the chickens. When your stuff is
interesting and important enough to get put behind a
paywall, where nobody reads it. When the 24 hour news
cycle leaves you with no time to check the prejudices you
franchise across the corporate network in your opinion
pieces against any facts.
When people want you
to be objective and unbiased, but also nail the bastards,
but also not be belligerent. When you speak truth
to power, and power ignores you, and people blame you for
not making an impact. When you realise
you're just reporting on how well politicians are doing
politics and how you reckon people will react to that, and
you really hope someone else is onto the whole 'what actual
effect these policies will have in the real world'
thing. When you remember the
person who would be doing that got fired and works in PR
now. And then you wonder
if you're ultimately just doing PR, but for much less
money. When you do so much
he said/she said reporting that you begin to doubt the
existence of a verifiable universe and you would say
something about Plato's Cave or logical positivism but your
boss is not an arts graduate. When they find out
you can do division and you get all the hard stats
stories. When your company
tries to run a Buzzfeed-style website but the world is now
full of Buzzfeed-style websites and your company doesn't
understand how Buzzfeed works. When you have enough
followers on Twitter that there's always at least one who
feels strongly enough about whatever you say that they won't
shut up about it. Or when you get the
same thing just because you're a woman with an opinion on
the Internet. That thing where
comment is free, in the sense that the columnists don't get
paid. That thing where
comment is fact-free and facts are scared. But remember, even
when the most hard-hitting story you did this week was
cross-promotion for a reality TV show… …and the second
most hard-hitting story was a rewritten press release about
the social media reaction to some celebrity gossip… …and the symbiotic
relationship between the Prime Minister and mass media light
entertainment is slowly sucking what used to be a democratic
function out of the veins of your industry… … there's always
coffee!