Older, seasoned pros will talk about the old days, when they could all just go for a drink after they hit their deadline, because their job was done. If they weren't on a daily publication, nobody really gave a fuck if you didn't do much work the day after deadline. When younger journos hear talk of days like this, they usually want to cut out the old chinwobbler's heart with a spoon, because it certainly ain't like that now.
Now a reporter isn't expected to file their story and fuck off, they've got to get a first take out there for the web, and then do a full story for print or broadcast, and then they're back doing updates for the online shitshow again. Guys like the Mediaworks team might have to do a live cross for the 5.30 Prime broadcast, and then have to turn around 20 minutes later and do it all over again for the Newshub at 6pm show.
And editors are dealing with a deluge of copy. Behind the scenes, vast swathes of jobs are simply gone, and skeleton staffs can be dealing with massive amounts of editorial content. Stories don't get the full once-over, and there simply isn't the extra 10 minutes needed to really massage a piece into perfection. 'Good enough' is the biggest result.
Online editors at the bigger newsrooms can be dealing with dozens and dozens of stories a day. If they're lucky, they might get 15 minutes to sub and prep a story, looking for mistakes, making sure it makes goddamn sense, finding a picture, formatting the story, adding related links, adding tags and giving it a snappy headline. Special projects, like long-term investigation pieces, obviously get more love and attention, but the vast majority of copy gets nothing more than a few minutes.
And on weekends, and outside regular office hours, the news flow might finally slow down a little, but there are even fewer staff. If you're wondering why it takes a while for things to appear on some of the big sites on a Sunday afternoon, or why it's taken so long for a fuck-up to be fixed, you really should get a fucking life, but the real answer is that even the largest newsroom might just have one single person dealing with the whole huge mess, all day long.
All this, of course, leads to all sorts of mistakes and oversights, as frazzled staff don't have that extra minute to double-check or confirm. It all just gets shoveled on, because there are 100 more things to deal with before you can go home. The kind of shitgobbler who spends their day moaning about these mistakes had more time to comb over the story than the poor fuckers who were actually responsible for it.
It won't get any better, not anytime soon, not with so many mergers demanding more from less staff, and more layoffs meaning more work is lumped on the damned souls who survive the inevitable culling.
As valuable as time is as a commodity, it's only only going to get squeezed tighter, and more errors and delays are on the cards.
- Catherine Grant
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