News-Record.com

A truism for newswomen:

If you decide to wear heels and a skirt to work, there is no doubt that you will cover a fire or flood that is nearly impossible to cover wearing heels and a skirt.

This is doubly true if you don't have a change of clothes and shoes in your car, which is why my trunk looks like a closet.

That's odd, Amy. Twenty years in the business and I've never had that happen to me. In fact, everytime I've worn heels and a skirt to work my editor has sent me home.

HA! This is why I don't comment on blogs OR visit the sports department very often.

Two of my staff members, ladies and gentlemen!

Makes you proud to be in journalism, doesn't it, Don?

Here are a couple:

-- The story that gets the most discussion from all corners of the budget meeting room and the most chuckles in a newspaper budget meeting is 99 percent of the time the one that does NOT end up on the front page (and likely on NO section front)

-- Newspaper muckety-mucks who say they want new ideas from the younger staff members never implement any of them.

-- A newspaper staff member who upper to middle management perceives as being "cool" can essentially write their own ticket (and that person is typically not a cool person, but only "cool" by comparision to everyone else in the newsroom)

-- A trend or hip thing -- no matter how played out -- instantly becomes "news" if the editor of the paper has just discovered it. (Or, if he's just found out a "young, cool person" is doing it/using it.)

-- The higher up a person is in newsroom management the worse their "multimedia and convergence" ideas are.

-- Newspapers are the only business where openness and fairness are preached so often and prominently, yet managment decisions about pay raises, hiring, promotion and moves (lateral and otherwise) in the organization are so cloaked in complete darkness and obfuscation that no one can ever figure out what ANY of them actually mean (even those involved in the moves).

-- The "star system" is alive and well at every newspaper although every editor at every newspaper would insist it is not. (And, related to this, those same editors are the ones who CREATE the star system with their own behavior.)

-- The more "book smart" of an image a reporter projects the less often their byline will appear in the newspaper. In other words, at newspapers, high-minded intellectuals spend most of their time THINKING (about various things -- little of which ever translate into bylines) and talking themselves and their editors OUT of doing stories.

More later...

OK, one more...

Newspaper executive or managing editors who periodically wander the newsroom and ask randomly of reporters "what's up?" really don't want any answer other than a positive one. And, no matter what answer they get, they will fidget uncomfortably waiting for a break in the one-sided conversation so they can duck back off to their office.

Is no one really going to respond to these???

I'm shocked that JR has not rushed to dispute them.

If you haven't noticed, I don't dispute much of the goofy stuff posted. And who knows, those could be true in whatever newsroom you work in.