I have talked extensively about my several years working as a professional journalist in the news business but there’s something about that time I haven’t been totally up front about. I really wasn’t that good at it.
Let me clarify. When I worked in production (video editing, cameras, mixing, page design etc.) I was pretty good at that stuff. I was also a pretty decent writer, for the most part. Except the things I was terrible at were why I never went very far in the industry. First is the most important one, deadlines. Every single news outlet I worked for had to regularly and very intensely reprimand and discipline me, constantly, for frequently missing deadlines. It wasn’t that I can’t work fast or that I can’t multi task, cuz I certainly can. But the problem is partly because I am bipolar I have a very non existant attention span.
You see even when I worked at a weekly newspaper where I had at least three to four full eight hour work days to write my stories, I was still turning things in so far past deadline we often were at the office on deadline day well into the early AM hours. My editor used to scold me for this pretty much every week. I am not good at meeting deadlines. I am also not good at handling pressure or high stress situations. Yes a lot of my time was covering breaking news or fatalities. While I could turn off my emotions and be professional while on scene, once I was in my car I often would break down and cry for several minutes. This stuff was hard on my soul.
I also talk about the different jobs I had. I was a video editor, staff writer, camera operator, Master Control technician, beat reporter, paginator, digital content manager, news editor, government reporter, and television news producer (which is a management level job so I had some skills I could capitalize on but I still was severely limited)
Like I said, when I was doing the technical jobs I was very fast, proficient and very professional. I probably should have stuck with editing and I might have lasted longer and gone further than I did. You see I didn’t go into the editorial side because it was what I wanted to do or even what I was best at, I went into the editorial side purely out of vanity. I wanted to be known, popular, famous. I didn’t want to be just a behind the scenes video editor or no name production assistant. I desperately wanted to sit at the desk, go out into the field and report live on the air, anything to be noticed and liked. Well, unfortunately I wasn’t young enough or skinny enough when I started out to get those jobs so I went into the print newspaper side because it was easier to get a staff writer job at a small town weekly than it was at a TV station.
Now I should mention I was not bad at the job, I just wasn’t great at it either. Yes I mention from time to time I am an award winning journalist. This is true I did win an award one time for a single article I wrote once. Okay so I won an award, it still technically makes me an award winning journalist but it wasn’t an extremely prestigious award if I am being honest, but who cares it’s still technically true.
After working a few years at different newspapers, working my way up to government reporter at a daily mid sized metro paper I finally talked my way into being given a change to work at a TV station as a producer. Except I should pull back the curtain here a little. You see I worked for a small market station in rural Texas. They had two channels. Their flagship was the CBS affiliate where they aired their prime time news programs that got all the views and attention. Then there was a sub station, a small town nothing Fox affiliate nobody watched that aired a single 30-minute newscast that had so few ratings the station was constantly talking about pulling it off the air. I worked on that nothing Fox program for three out of the five days of my work week. Except I have to be further honest. The station management basically told me since nobody watches that show anyways I had freedom to do whatever I wanted, within reason. Most of the time the anchor and I agreed since the CBS station was the most important and our show was filler, we usually just copied the entire show from an earlier CBS broadcast and made updates as necessary. In other words I was barely producing that show. In reality what I was doing was taking a show someone else had already previously produced eariler in the day and just repeating in on my show with new infromation if we had it. I mostly just pulled network filler content off the web to fill in the gaps where there was content I couldn’t pull over.
The other two days of the week I did get to produce the higher rated CBS newscast. Except only because I was the weekend producer. While the 10 PM cast is the one everyone watches. because of sports most weekends we didn’t even have a 5 PM show so most weeks I had an entire 7 hours to produce 15 minutes of TV news, sports and weather got the rest of the time. So yeah I was technically a TV producer but I reallty wasn’t great at it and I was only entrusted with basically the broadcasts nobody was even watching anyways. It was supposed to be training for eventually taking over the flagship show but well let’s just say I screwed up the one time I was allowed to do that and I was pulled from the rotation and told I wasn’t allowed to produce that show without supervision. Not to mention I only worked at that station for barely nine months before I was let go.
The reason I wanted to confess my true experiences in the business is because yes I bring it up that I did those things and I do talk about the work I did that was considered important, I need to be very clear, I was never really the top level editorial staff at any establishment, more often than not I was usually doing filler work most people weren’t even going to bother with. And the only reason I was given the government reporter beat was because of mass layoffs left our staff of 12 full time reporters cut down to just 2 full time and me, the part timer they kept because I didn’t fetch the higher wages that those they laid off did. In other words it was a great opportunity for me and I did a damn good job during my tenure, I wasn’t picked because I was the best candidate for that beat, it was just they had no other option and I would work for mnimum wage whereas other, much better journalists than I, would not. so there you have it a much more accurate depiction of my time working in the news industry. Yes the work I did was important, I was good enough to last several years and I wasn’t a slouch by any means but there was very obviously better people in the field around me and I just sorta floated along until I wasn’t able to anymore.
Stephanie Bri 