I read the news today, oh boy

It is with some sadness that I read about the newspaper business dying, but it doesn’t shock me, because newspapers generally treat their employees like crap, pay them like cabbage pickers and provide a work environment just this side of an Indonesian T-shirt factory.

Other than that, it’s a pretty swell job.

I worked at newspapers for about 10 years, and though I often loved what I was doing, it was rarely worth it. The robber barons who owned the newspaper companies were making money hand over fist, while the writers and editors and photographers generally had a standard of living just higher than dumpster divers.

I remember when I graduated from college and I began to call around to see what sort of bountiful opportunities awaited a bright, ambitious young graduate just itching to make his mark on the world. My first offer was from a weekly newspaper in north Georgia, which offered me a whopping salary of $10,000, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money now. It didn’t sound like a lot of money in 1986, either. Cause it wasn’t.

I took a job at my hometown paper for (slightly) more money than that, and commenced to newspapering. The glamour of the job didn’t last long. I think it went away my second week, when I had to cover a Rotary Club meeting. The speaker was a guy showing us slides from his recent trip to Amish country (they don’t drive cars!). We opened the meeting by singing God Bless America and The Old Grey Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be, led by a woman who looked like Lillian Carter on an out-of-tune piano. I had arrived.

Later I became sports editor. That was a special day. The editor of the paper came to my desk one Monday morning and said “Don’t you like sports?” I said yes. He said, “You’re the new sports editor.” It was the only conversation we ever had. He bumped my salary up $15 bucks a week, which, if you divided it by the number of hours I actually worked, came to about .00004 more cents per hour.

I moved on to another paper as sports editor after that and stayed there for four years, during which time I covered a LOT of exciting events. I once reported on a girls’ basketball game with a final score of 70-4, and the game wasn’t as close as the score indicated. I like girls, and I like basketball, but I really didn’t like girls’ basketball.

I left that job for a news editing job back in my hometown, which was the worst career decision I ever made. The place was an absolute madhouse, overseen by this little bantam rooster of a publisher who liked to tell you that he had done, during his career, every job at that newspaper. To which I would always say under my breath, “And none of them well.”

I inherited a group of reporters working for me there who shouldn’t have been hired to write grocery lists, let alone newspaper stories. They had the collective vocabulary of an Atlanta cab driver and the ambition of a mollusk.

Once during a story meeting with them I said, “You know, you guys aren’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein.” There was not a glimmer of recognition on any of their faces. So I said, “Do you know who I’m talking about?” Nothing. “Anybody heard of Watergate?” They had not. I fired them all on the spot. Then somebody reminded me that I didn’t have the authority to fire anybody. So I asked if I could shoot them, and was again turned down. They are probably all still out there today, infecting the world with stupidity.

Small papers have been hit the hardest and are going under, and quite frankly, for the most part they deserve it. I still have some friends in the business, and God bless them, but I could never go back. I have a recurring nightmare where I’m working again at a newspaper, and I’m sitting at the same shabby desk, looking at the same moldy walls, and the bantam rooster is strutting around barking out orders. It’s worse than the “going to work in my underwear” dream.

It’s a shame, because at a newspaper I could write things people might actually be interested in. I used to write a regular column and enjoyed it when I would get a reaction. Now I write this blog, and I’m not sure anybody even reads it, most of the time. But at least I don’t have to deal with the rooster.