Daily Newsie

I belong to a group called “Customers Suck!” on LiveJournal, which offers no end of infuriating tales about rude, demanding, baffling, and just plain crazy customers. Someone posted today about her job at the cable company and dealing with customers who were angry about sun outages, and it reminded me of my own experience with them. See, I used to work for an editor who would become obsessively convinced that random people were lying to us or keeping information from us, and would storm around the newsroom insisting that something was going on. I was assigned a complete crap story about sun outages and how they affect our local cable provider, so I called the general manager of the cable provider and wrote up a short story letting people know their reception may be affected at certain times of the year.

Oh, no. My boss was convinced that “sun outages” were code for “crappy service,” and would not leave me alone about it. Even after I called a meteorologist and found substantial sources online that explained the phenomenon, he wouldn’t leave it alone. (Yet, when I complained that the state police would not return any of my phone calls when I was the police reporter, he refused to do anything about it.) Apparently he thought our cable people should have figured out a way to outwit the sun by now. Luckily, he had a relatively short attention span and eventually retreated back into his office after I ignored him for a while.

Sadly, this incident is not isolated, especially at that newspaper. I’ve worked for three in my time as a journalist and all of them have been populated with conspiracy theorists. A degree of paranoia is healthy — after all, journalists are tasked with “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” — but creating conspiracies where none exist and ignoring the real ones seems to be a hallmark of those at the top, who have become so separated from their reporter roots that they think it’s acceptable to send reporters on wild goose chases. (At another newspaper, my editor assigned me a story after a special election measure failed: “The Special Election: What Went Wrong?” A fellow reporter looked at her and said, “Uh, no one voted for it.” At least she listened to him and took it off my budget.)

Upcoming newspaper stories include being forced to drive to a nearby community to look at a fire hydrant, writing the most irrelevant story of all time in place of a relevant story my editor rejected, and having to run out on deadline for “real people” quotes because truckers apparently aren’t real people. There’s no shortage of crazy, trust me, and it’s all much funnier now that I don’t work there anymore. Stay tuned!