rich daddy
I've been trying to hew closer to enviro topics, but this post on Gilliard caught my eye, and I felt like it shouldn't go unblogged...
Look around your newsroom. How many working class employees do you have? How many minorities?
When I left college, my parents, both union employees, could no more pay my rent than buy me a new car. The money was not there and would not be there. When you say "suck it up", you also say "we can only hire those who have parents with resources." Which means you get a largely white, largely middle class workforce, covering, in your case, an organization which is nearly 50 percent minority. How does that help your coverage. It isn't a fat stipend in Northern Virginia, it's poverty wages, which are as racially and class exclusive as a restricted country club. People who can barely pay for college, can hardly afford to work for subsistance level wages which they can beat at Wal-Mart.
Your comparison to graduate school is both amusing and seriously flawed.
Most people who go to graduate school do so on a combination of loans and stipends. Many cannot ask their parents to pay because the money isn't there. You run a profit-making corporation who's executives are handsomely compensated. No one is asking them to borrow money to live. Yet, you expect to hire good people and keep them by paying them crap?
If you want a diverse newsroom, you can't expect people to subsidize your workers. Because a kid who had to borrow his way through College Park or UNC doesn't have the resources to make crap pay until he or she finds a new job. This attitude will lead to more people choosing other ways to report, ones which do not require starvation and vows of poverty.
I had resumes out all over the country during my last two undergrad semesters at Naropa - after three years of eating yogurt and peanut butter and getting a headache from worry every time I bought a pizza, the chance to make fifteen thousand dollars a year in Squaresville, Arkansas or Beached Whale, Delaware seemed like winning the fucking lottery. I was ready to take my licks.
To top that off, I made a play for the Westword's - that is, the New Times - writing fellowship, for those writers (and here I quote) "who, through no fault of their own, lack the experience to be hired into such [staff] positions."
After about six or seven months of this, the only publication that bothered to even send me a rejection letter was the New Times, who told me, ho ho, that I lacked experience. No fault of my own of course.
That's a tight market. Naropa's not NYU or the Ivy League, but you write papers in MLA just like you do anyplace else (If that's not enough, I have clips to show, stuff on actual topics that I got paid in real dollars for).
Steve's right about the "graduate school" on a stipend thing. Two fucking words, there - bull and shit. I'm in grad school now because I can't get hired to write, not even about small-town stuff like snowfall or plows or mining museums.
One thing Stevie Gee doesn't mention is that 99.9% of what constitutes print media would just as soon deal with freelancers or writers who have to beg column inches, rather than see said scribes around the office. This weekend I warned another local blogger (who shall remain anonymous so I don't get yon blogger in trouble) who writes occasionally for a local pub to lean on the bosses for a real live job at some point, otherwise they'll just keep going to the well and keep the blogger-in-question hanging on.
And that's the worst part. At this end, it's a bit like the low rent side of showbusiness, with the desperate, No-No-Really-My-Dreams-Are-Not-Dead denial that leads to outright whoring for cash and the momentary rush that used to be more like a happy glow when you saw your name in a by-line. And as much as you'd like to think about whores and hearts of gold and happy endings, we all know how they really end up.
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