I'm not sure if this ranks a "coming of age" story, or merely one of waking up. I can say for certain that a paradigm shift has taken place in the last fifteen years, between me and the newspaper business.
Part of this tale is truly sad, for as I've become more aware, others in the print industry have only increased their denial – arrogantly so, in some cases. Arrogance, as a defense mechanism, is not that surprising if you've been around the various personality types who populate this self-gratified media world as long as I have.
First, a reality check – if you've paid attention to business news at all lately, you know that the newspaper industry is currently trudging through shit. It held its own against its chief rival, television, when the two believed they were the only dogs in the fight. They scuffled, routinely, like pro-wrestlers re-fighting the same match night after night along a tour circuit, to an entertaining but intentional draw. They shared the mass audience to mutual benefit, under the guise of competing for it.
Just as the big three terrestrial networks fought a naive ratings game with cable only to become subservient to it, the news-pulp empire has too become an Alamo, fending off the ever proliferating Internet – like survivors holed up in a barricaded shopping mall against the growing zombie horde.
The immense torrents of misinformation, rumor and jabbering opinion that masquerade as "news" online, combined with journalism's own inner decay, have resulted in an intellectually barren media landscape. Viral video-casts and ethics-free satellite broadcasting, where it's more important to work an F-bomb into a sentence than a truthful noun or adjective, have opened the bombay doors beneath us. Self-abandonment is the new "freedom" – a free-fall that looks just like flying, until the nasty old ground rises up and spoils it.
What I've encountered – and kept a running mental tab of for nearly two decades – has been astonishing, and not in a good way.
When I first got into newspapers many years ago as a young compositor – what graphic artists were called then, and when I was genuinely young – I was put through the standard gauntlet of passive-aggression. I took my turn in Intimidation-101, which I learned each newspaper had its own spin on. There is no official "paying of one's dues" in the paper business. When you move to a different job at another newspaper, there is no acknowledgement of anything you endured at the offices of your former one. You are expected to run the gauntlet once more – be fresh meat again and prove yourself against another pack of cronying, self-distracted little-bigshots.
The only rule that all newspapers have in common is that they have each established their own constantly evolving – if improvised habituation can be classified somehow under 'evolution' – "system" for getting a new edition out every morning. And squeezing as much work out of their staffs for as little compensation as can be gotten away with – even when labor knows it's over a barrel because of the strapped economy, and management knows that labor knows, and proceeds to pump the dildo harder anyway.
There are very few businesses where so many disparately tasked departments work side-by-side under one roof, and care less about each other's welfare. Each faction does its job with as little regard, or more and more, with as little competence as necessary, and escapes home to leave someone else holding the bag.
A surefire trick to going home on time is to con another department's workers into believing that some of your duties actually belong to them instead. I've never had the privilege, but it must be sweet.
Management are the people who've mastered the art. They talk all day, and little else. They unctuously discuss what "needs" to be done, until the subject bores them, or the phone interrupts – another discussion concerning some other unctuous "need." The urgent business is ushered out the door with a wave, for the drones to worry about, with a vague notion that their meager livelihoods are at risk.
Some quick definitions.
Management: The ones who get to go home early, even at the outset of apocalypse.
The crisis: Your problem, not theirs. The only upside is that it only lasts until tomorrow, to be replaced by another crisis even more dire. If it isn't taken care of, they get to complain about YOUR incompetence. You get to complain about the length of the unemployment line.
If your faith already wanes regarding our journalism media, you probably don't want to be a fly on the wall for a meeting of your local paper's editorial board. You'll come away looking for either a razor for your wrists, or the nearest gun shop to get on the waiting list.
A quick revelation, in case you were still wondering: Media people hate you.
Once a day they gather around a conference table to discuss which of us on the outside world is most deserving of their everything-but-objective spotlight. If they deem you foolish enough, you'll be tomorrow's featured player at the circus.
The generic, categoric reference to those of us toiling to survive in the real world boils down to "Looks like old Shit-for-brains is at it again."
They decide each afternoon how to repackage a product that we civilians will pay to have thrown at our doors, one more time, tomorrow morning. In short, newspaper people are celebrities. Their names, after all, appear in print regularly.
What today's journalists and media people practice is more accurately the progressive spin of elitism, which balances out the elitism of the corporate right. Haven't you noticed? We, bound to lives of day-to-day survival, are the ideological "middle class." The corporate moneychangers and media trendsetters are the ones enjoying actual "options" in life. The ones whose incomes are not completely consumed by monthly bills and playing by the rules. Journalists used to report what's happening, but now "review" it. Many young journalists enter the industry precisely because they've been taught it is salaried activism. Activism for their own shit. Political. Trendy. Cool. Whether or not it's relevant.
So too is advertising a collusion of loose cannons presented to resemble a disciplined business. Some of the reasons modern advertising gnaws at most people's sanity are actually not too sublime. The ad industry doesn't try to bombard your id with hidden messages in ice cubes anymore – it has adopted the sledge hammer approach. Relentless, repetitive, aggressive behavior modification.
By simple contemplation, nearly anyone who reads a print ad, watches a TV commercial, or pays vague attention to a car radio will perceive a brazen con being pitched. The era of an earnest business "getting its message out," is long over.
Some might label it all an indictment of capitalism, but it's more accurately the sublime triumph of greed. The cure is not socialism – the system where private sector greed is outlawed so that government greed can enjoy impunity. The only thing worse than the maddening caterwaul of advertising, would be an enslaving federal mandate that you MUST buy a bigscreen TV and a smartphone with a government surveillance chip – which is likely coming.
So smoke 'em while you got 'em. You're already surrounded by folks who think you don't deserve 'em – even though you planted 'em, grew 'em, rolled 'em and then paid for 'em, too.
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