A lot of journos might have sensitive souls, but they need to armour that shit up with that thick skin, or the rest of the world is going to take a giant dump on that sensitivity. It's easy enough to shrug off all that shit, because most of the sniping and moaning is coming from people outside the media, who, quite simply, have no fucking clue what they are talking about. They don't know what's going on behind the scenes, or what kind of unknown pressures reporters and editors are struggling with, but they've still got a fucking opinion about it.
But it's a lot harder to swallow when it comes from within. When it comes from other reporters, in a public forum, it can get right in under the skin, and twist painfully. They should know the pressures their colleagues are under, and that they are going to make fuck-ups that they regret.
There are things like the mostly harmless KJA on Facebook, where most of the loudest voices are from folks who haven't stepped foot in a newsroom since the time of Alexander The Great, so who cares what they think? The number of actual journalists who work on daily or weekly publications that actually post in that group is noticeably tiny. (Although a recent deplorable discussion about the reporting of a NZ journo's death overseas - less than a day after he died - was well over the fucking line, and the unmitigated cunts who decided to jump in with bullshit accusations of media hypocrisy and retarded conspiracy theories straight away can all fucking burn in hell, as far as Media Scrum is concerned.)
And there are some rare posts on social media from journos slagging off the opposition, which is just nasty. Every decent sized newsroom is always full of conversations trashing their competitors, because we are a bunch of snarky motherfuckers about each other, but there is a big gulf between trash talk in the office, and going online to spread the spite.
But the worst is when somebody in your own company sees something on their website sneers at an inappropriate picture or mistaken headline in a public forum. These shitgobblers should know the difference between private and public statements more than anybody, and could easily let their online editors know about it before pointing it out to the whole world.
There are plenty of worse things a journalist could do - they could be a plagiarist or a bully or an unethical son of a bitch - but ratting on your direct colleagues is pretty fucking low.
And shit, pissing off people in your company by publicly pointing out the flaws of your immediate colleagues, when they might even be in the same fucking newsroom as you, is a really bad idea. Everybody has got to work together, and taking that kind of shit from people who should know better is an unnecessary part of the job.
Criticism from colleagues can be invaluable, but snark has no currency, and we're all in this same sinking ship together. We don't need crew members drilling more holes in the hull.
- Katherine Grant
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