At the risk of repeating myself, don’t let valid obstacles in your newsroom become excuses for your failure to develop as a digital journalist. No one benefits (or hurts) more from your career than you do. So don’t leave your career success or fulfillment in the hands of bosses who are stuck in the past.
I also should note that this prolongs my already-long curmudgeon conversation. This post is prompted by a comment from “FormerStaffer” on my recent lessons-learned post, following up on my “Dear Newsroom Curmudgeon” post. FormerStaffer makes some valid points:
Some curmudgeons are made by their own newsrooms. Lack of decent training is a big issue. If a newsroom worker doesn’t have personal time off the job to learn these new skills (new baby, sick family member, working two jobs, aging parents, or similar problems), is it fair to penalize that worker for the problems in his or her private life?
Newsrooms also give mixed signals. If the paper claims to be web first, but only posts some stories first on the web, what is the message to staffers? If there are no consequences for failing to post on the web, but missing press deadline by 10 minutes produces an angry memo, what message is being sent?
If a staff member trying to learn Twitter asks for guidelines about using Twitter (what to post, what kind of language shouldn’t go in a quote in a tweet, whether tweets should refer to rival news operations, whether out-of-focus photos that are banned from the printed product can be sent with tweets, etc.) then the question shouldn’t be ignored or brushed off — someone should think about writing some guidelines, even if they’re only four or five items on a list.
I will address the issues shortly, but first I want to say this: I will be emailing FormerStaffer to ask whether he or she worked recently in a Digital First Media newsroom. If one of our newsrooms is operating this way, then Jim Brady and I will want to address these issues directly with the editors leading that newsroom. I’ll also offer to email FormerStaffer’s former editors if he or she doesn’t work in our company. Editors who operate like this need to be called out on their backward behavior. But now, I want to address FormerStaffer directly:
Curmudgeons are not made by their newsrooms. Don’t give bad bosses that much control over your career happiness and success.
I say this as one who has felt as you feel, who blamed my editors and my companies for the things I didn’t like about my career. After being fired as editor of the Minot Daily News in 1992 (OK, I still blame the publisher and the company for that), I spent six months looking for my next job.
I also spent six months evaluating whether and how I wanted to continue my journalism career (if I even could). As I reflected on my career to that point, I looked back on a lot of fun and a lot of rewarding work. I also looked back on a lot of anxiety and at times even misery as I fought or fretted over bad decisions by my employers and editors. When the bosses killed newspapers in Des Moines and Kansas City, I became too consumed by the resulting problems. I became overwrought about the actions of my editors and publishers (and even by the wife of the publisher when I worked in Shenandoah, Iowa).
I decided that I would never again give the bosses that much control over my career happiness and success. And the 20 years since then have been happier and more successful than the first 20 years of my career. I’ve still had bosses who did things I regarded as counterproductive. I’ve had some miserable days and my happiness sagged at times when I was looking for a new job because of the bosses’ decisions. But even in those stretches I was happier than I had been during disruptions earlier in my career.
I don’t minimize the importance of getting on the same page as your bosses; I have changed jobs because I disagreed with the direction my company was headed, and I’m sure I am happier and more successful now, in strong agreement with Jim, John Paton and our direction at Digital First Media.
But however good or bad your bosses are, journalism is fun work. Lots of journalists made a big deal Wednesday of the ranking of newspaper reporter on the list of 10 worst jobs, worse than waiter and not quite as bad as oil rig worker. Yes, job security is shaky now, and the commenter addresses the some of the work environment issues. But if you focus on the work, reporting (and other journalism jobs) are fun, fulfilling work.
You can’t control everything about your career. But you can control your outlook. I had a lot of success and happiness in the first 20 years of my career. But I’ve had more of both since I changed my outlook and decided I alone would be responsible for my happiness and success.
Specific advice relating to FormerStaffer’s points:
About training: Yes, your bosses need to provide more training and more time for training (as we are in the Digital Ninja School). But take the initiative yourself. Find a workshop, seminar or webinar you could attend, a News University course you could take online from your desk. Then propose to your editors that they give you the time (and pay the money) for you to get that training. If they just give you the time, take the time and invest in your own future. If they won’t give you the time, take your own time (yes, the personal factors you mentioned are all valid, but some of them are short-lived; you can and should invest some time in career development). Or just learn on the job. No one taught me Twitter or Storify. I just started using them and learned by using them.
About mixed signals and deadlines. Challenge bosses on mixed signals. Ask for clarification. But the example you cite seems thin to me. Most web traffic comes during the day. Print deadlines are in the evening. For evening sporting events and meetings, web and print considerations might clash. In those cases, post a quick bulletin with results to the web (and Twitter and text alerts) and turn your attention to the print story. Or develop a Digital First workflow that feeds digital platforms by liveblogging and live-tweeting and also streamlines work for the print edition.
Asking for guidelines. Don’t ask, tell. Tell your editor what your approach to using Twitter is going to be. Don’t ask whether it’s OK to link to competing organizations. Tell the editor that you think linking is good digital journalism and when the competition beats you on a story, you will link to them and get to work on catching up and getting ahead (or let the link suffice because the story you were working on is a better use of your time). If the editor disagrees, then he or she needs to provide guidance. Outline your approach to using Twitter. That will result in either the guidelines you want or a helpful discussion of Twitter use. Or if the response is silence, you at least have some protection if the editor gets mad next time you link to the competition.
This response is long enough — maybe too long — already, but if you want to read more, these are themes I have addressed before:
Love your honesty in this post Steve regarding your career ups and downs. Very transparent. *Smiles* I totally agree that journos need to take responsibility for their professional development. Too many fault the company or their editors for lack of training. And while we can always do a better job in that area, it starts with the individual. They must take the initiative. They should not wait for the company to lead them. They should lead and take charge of their own destiny and career. You’re living proof of what can happen when you invest in your career on your own time learning new tools. Kudos to you for inspiring others to do the same.
LikeLike
Thanks for the kind words, Buffy. I should add that I know it takes some time and some hard knocks to learn some of these lessons.
LikeLike
When an industry changes in a revolution, there are going to be those who no longer fit. Modern journalism needs the personal entrepreneurial skills that made Steve happier in his second two professional decades.
Yes, companies must take training very seriously, but the days of doing essentially the same job for 30 years are over. Journalists work too closely to the technological edge to sink into professional complacency. There’s something new every day and we have to be open to continuous (not continual) change. If a journalist can’t live with that, they really need to decide on what they’re going to be doing for a living this time next year.
LikeLike
For ‘content’ journalists, this is excellent advice. For those of us in the graphic design part of the biz, it’s a more complex journey. Many websites I look at DO use design heavily, but news sites (in the U.S., at least), usually do not. So we are learning to use online tools to build maps and informational graphics, but the workflow is a work in progress, like so much of the digital revolution.
LikeLike
I’m torn between tickled and perplexed by how often I find myself reading you or Mandy and thinking “are reporters just now figuring that out? We nerds knew.” Not about technology – about careers, working for people, and keeping your skills fresh.
Journalism as a modern discipline has about 50 years on us geeks but I’m not sure it’s done you any favors. Our platforms have been changing since day one so when the web shift happened it was a little less shocking for us than you. But we’re not immune – we saw people who refused to update from ‘big iron’ mainframes see their jobs dry up and their field shrink, though some got a brief reprieve from Y2K and a chance to sell their FORTRAN skills a few extra years.
Those of us who are successful over time tend to be the people who recognize that what they do is not what they do it ON. Plenty of people make the mistake – they think that because they got successful in location X that it’s where they should plant their flag.
To be fair to journalists and refusenik programmers, I think every industry has a sizable percentage of folks who refuse to move along with the tides. Most industries just don’t have the changing landscape for them to blame their career stagnation on.
LikeLike
Excellent points, Don.
LikeLike
[…] a blog post today, “Don’t let your bosses’ decisions control your career success or happiness,” Steve Buttry writes that he once “blamed my editors and my companies for the things I […]
LikeLike
It’s been more than 15 years since I decided to leave my job delivering flowers and planting trees at a nursery, go back to school and become a newspaper reporter. Since then (1997) I have build a career as a writer and editor and watched the world change and move under my feet – first with digital cameras and jpgs, which replaced film and contact sheets, then digital layout, web postings once a week, and in the last three years have observed and taken part in – to some extent – the skyrocketing changes that our industry has embraced. I have a title that has the word “managing” and “editor” in it, but they don’t go hand in hand right now because in spite of the massive changes and rolling waves that crash on our desks, we still have to read email, copy and paste, process in photoshop, built unending queues of pages and try, in the midst of it all, to become a ninja.
Well, I pray that my bosses over the years are doing OK. Most of them have moved on, some of them stayed behind, and some of them, like me, are trying to keep up. Am I a curmudgeon? Probably, and that’s pretty sad, to be labeled as such, but I also believe that what I am doing is often so contrary to what is happening around me that I feel like giving up.
Saying “don’t let your bosses” do anything to slow you down from reaching your goals is so, so easy to say when you’re on top. What happens when you’re constantly reminded that you’re never doing enough, and you can’t seem to get out of your own way? What happens when you are saddled with people who simply refuse to budge?
Mr. Buttry, I’m not asking for answers. Your thoughtful blog, which I just read, was inspiring, and it does remind me that I need to find the joy and excitement I once experienced as a journalist. I just don’t feel it right now. I pray it will return. I want to be better, and I want to excel in my company. I was once told I was the glue that held the newsroom together. I sometimes wonder what will happen when I get so watered down that I can’t do it anymore.
Want to know what the best part of my day was today? Editing a story for one of my staff members. It was a fleeting moment of normalcy in an otherwise grinding experience in my newsroom.
And before you respond, DON’T tell me I should leave if I don’t like what’s happening; I never said that. I just wonder where I fit in all of this – and why nobody seems to be able to give me a real answer to that question.
LikeLike
where you fit in? maybe you answered your own question “to become a ninja!”. Or samurai, juggler, jack of all trades, all while riding a unicycle back and forth across a teeter totter on a boat riding the waves. Probably an environment where everyone else is also a ninja would help, but that’s maybe not as realistic. I’m sure you’ll figure something out, your glue is seems closer to the strength of silk versus elmers, :).
LikeLike
@emily:
There seems to be a disconnect in understaffed newsrooms between the amount of traditional work to do, the amount of new work to do, and the ability to right-size workloads so newsroom workers can do their best.
It gave me a lot of satisfaction to improve my editing skills by following various online blogs, such as John McIntyre’s blog and some of the sites on his blogroll (his personal site is still accessible and lists some very good sites — go to http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/). I was interested in what the blogs said, and some of them could be read while I was on hold on the phone or eating lunch.
If someone wanted to make journalism better, they could finance some fellowships that provided training and a time for reflection for people who are sincerely interested in learning something and have potential (regardless of age and based on evaluations from the fellowship committee, not the newsroom) rather than a record of stardom. Knight and Nieman do good work, but they benefit the already privileged. Larger companies might consider job exchanges to do some cross-training. That might have really helped emily or me.
LikeLike
Not so long before I went on medical leave, the training our newsroom ‘Multimedia Editor’ offered was : “Look up the links.” I admit, I have only ten years experience online but “look up the links’ seemed just a tad dismissive.
LikeLike
I can argue both sides of this one, Chris. Yes, a newsroom undertaking a digital-first revolution needs to provide a range of training opportunities: seminars, conferences, workshops, webinars, tutorials and “look up the links.” so if they are only providing links, they aren’t doing enough.
But if you didn’t look up the links and try to learn from online resources, the problem is with you (or with colleagues who don’t work to improve themselves by using online resources).
This post was actually prompted by a three-day visit to a newsroom where I led 10 workshops. Though we had a lot of participation, part of the wrap-up conversation with top editors was about the people in the newsroom who needed the training (and, in some cases, had signed up to attend workshops) but didn’t bother to attend.
So, yes, if your boss is only providing links, I will join you in criticizing
LikeLike
A quirk in the WordPress iPad app didn’t let me finish that comment. My final point: If your newsroom is only providing links, that’s a valid point on which I’ll criticize your bosses. But that doesn’t excuse a journalist’s failure/refusal to learn. Click those links and learn. Then find some more on your own and keep learning.
LikeLike
[…] to find the joy and excitement I once experienced as a journalist,” an editor told me in a recent comment on my blog. “I just don’t feel it right now. I pray it will […]
LikeLike
Steve, Emily:
I”ve been writing a lot late about the whole notion of being overwhelmed as we manage newsrooms, in part due to our tendency to be ‘plugged-in’ 24 hours a day. I actually was out of the office sick a couple days last week, and I can tell you I can’t remember the last time I was out sick. Guess what? I missed it. I kind of like swimming in this technology. Here’s the thing I always fall back on, Emily. I write. My day is incomplete if I don’t post on my blog, If you don’t write one now, I’d encourage you to do so. It’s a great release valve. Every day I get to create something, blow off some steam, offer a sports thought, and compile the daily numbers. Of course, to do that I usually get in here at an insane hour. But here’s the deal. When you strip away everything else, that’s what we do. We write. So write! And by all means have fun with it. When the readers start reacting, and they wonder where you are when the blog is not updated, you’ll know you’re on to something. – Phil Heron
LikeLike
[…] continued the conversation further with a third post, Don’t let your bosses’ decisions control your career success or happiness, responding to a comment in the lessons learned post. This one got 951 […]
LikeLike
In my opinion, we live in wonderful times . Thanks to the advent of the Internet, the boundaries become erased, time from 8 hour working day moved to 24 (whole day) business never stops (when one hemisphere sleeps, wakes up another one).
Why you need a boss??? In today’s Internet there are WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Why we need magazines now, if people read electronic magazines and books ?
Why should I go to the office and stand in traffic jams 3-5 hours a day.
Why you need to get a job as a journalist and endure humiliation from the bosses, if anyone can be independent journalists at his Live Journal, WordPress or Twitter?
I think that many people (being conservative) have not yet realized all the benefits that the Internet gives us !
What is the NY Times? – it’s just a blog, on which there are many authors … This is the key to action.
Instead newspapers, you have WordPress, instead of the editor ( boss , secretary, etc.) – you ! Instead salary – profit of Pay Per Click programs or Affiliate Programs.
You – the owner of the future! You do not need a boss, you does not need a publishing house, you do not need an employer !
LikeLike