So you move on...

When I decided to quit my (fairly successful) job as an office manager & network administrator to enroll in journalism school I had no idea what I was in for.

All most every other student in the program was 18 years old, or close to it. They had little real-world experience. Many of them enrolled in college simply as a means to stave off the inevitable plunge in to the daily grind of adulthood.

Coming from a rather difficult background and with my life suddenly spinning in a new direction, I was easily annoyed by the trivial problems these teenagers.

However, I did find that we all basically shared one common goal when it came to journalism, to seek out and publicize the “truth.”

We, in all of our naivety, thought that we would leave our J school and change the world.

Even I, with the cynicism of a poor adult student who has seen the ax fall on many a good person, fell in to this fairy tale of journalistic integrity.

Our instructors pounded home the “code of ethics” and showed us films about journalists who have fought the good fight (i.e. Woodward and Bernstein - Watergate).

We learned that objectivity was the life-blood of the journalist and that without it you were just another PR rat.

Ahh, those were the days.

Today, of course, I know better.

After tenures at a two large regional daily papers, a conglomerate of local weekly papers and now a set of eight monthly community papers, I know better.

I have learned many things, but mostly I have learned that money talks.

Advertising is what keeps papers alive, and so advertisers are the real publishers of newspapers.

The bigger the advertiser, and the smaller the newspaper, the more say they have in your content.

It doesn’t take long before a steady stream of “fluff” assignments and killed stories dashes the aspirations of a wide-eyed college student.

What are the chances that your editor is going to run a story exposing the lies of a political candidate, when the week before the paper officially “endorsed” said candidate.

So you move on. You take a job as an editor at a smaller place, maybe a weekly community paper.

Before long, you find yourself getting an earful from an advertising manager because, apparently the story you wrote about the school board president getting a DUI made an advertiser mad.

Suddenly, you are forced to run your “negative” stories past the advertising manager for approval.

So you move on. You take a job at small community newspaper, maybe a monthly.

This time you figure, at least if you are going to have to curb your writing, you can be upfront about it instead of pretending to be an objective news source.