"I feel strongly that producers need connections away from work. Even if you think you are only going to be in a place a couple of years, join a church, a community group, volunteer at the humane society, do local theatre, something to be with "real" people. Newsroom culture, in general, is not "real" - we are more sensitive to certain ideas and points of view and don't have much experience with others because most news people are "alike." We need to "get out" and see what "real" people are like."Amen. If you are a regular reader of FrancisPage, you can tell I've been finding escapes... even if that means rolling the clock back 200 years or so!
I have come close to quitting the business. That was in 1999, at a previous station in Texas. I had just been promoted off of weekends to a weekday job producing the 6 and 10pm newscasts. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was about to inherit a whole new set of headaches. They came in the form of an uptight anchor, a moody news director, several staffers who were mailing it in, and another producer who was slacking and sliding. It just got worse as the weeks rolled by. I dealt with it by going out to the movies on my newly liberated weekends... sometimes two features a day.
I never will forget the meeting I had with a consultant in August of that year. It came a few weeks after I had worked a very long weekend producing coverage of Hurricane Bret, which mercifully had spared most of populated Texas its full wrath. The first words out of his mouth were not encouraging.
"So, I hear your hurricane coverage sucked."
Huh? What? I worked all weekend on this, with lots of help from my assistant news director. We were working with people who had never covered a hurricane before and were learning on the job. We had people who had never done live, sustaining coverage for the amount of time we did it. And capping this all off, when all hands were supposed to have been on deck, when all of us were working mad hours, that one slider producer managed to slip out of town with no consequences to her employment.
My response to that consultant was that of polite surprise. But maybe I shouldn't have pulled punches. I should've said something like this:
"Look, here's the honest truth. We hire high school people for editors. We hire the same for photographers and camera crews. We don't pay diddly. We put interns in where experienced people should go. We have a hot-headed news director. We have a nightbeat reporter with relationship issues that are spilling into the newsroom. We have too many newbies who can't write to save their lives. I'm getting hit from three sides between management, anchors and my own gut. And if this keeps up, I'm going to be chewing on the end of a gun barrel and leaving behind a bunch of people who don't understand it."
I don't know what he would've done. Maybe he would've run out of the room. I'll never know.
Three months later, I escaped to a new producing job -- a new station, a new city, a chance to renew myself. I wouldn't trade the staff I work with every night for anything. They have become a second family to me. I'm still seeing movies, but the pains of labor are not threatening to break me. And in finding another life outside the station I have found new perspective and new hope. My co-workers support me in these endeavors as I support them every day on the job. For that, I am grateful. And every day I am alive I feel blessed.
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