Here’s a sort of random clip from the very end of my interview today with Mike Coleman from WACH-FOX 57 today about the layoffs at The State. Some rather more relevant parts should air on their news broadcast tonight.
Mostly I talked about the industry in general. I’m not really in a position to talk about what’s going on at The State now, and in any case I’d hate for anything I say to make things tough for those still there.
In fact, in this bit at the very end, I’m pointing out to Mike how all media are stretched thin, including his own. This new thing of having one-man “crews” cover the news reminds me of that spoof they did on Saturday Night Live in the early 90s, when they had Al Franken (you know, the U.S. senator, if you can get your mind around that) travelling around the globe speaking into a camera that was attached by a boom to a helmet he wore, causing him no end of neck pain.
Funny then. Not so funny now that simple, lightweight cameras and other innovations make it possible.
In my waning years at the paper, I sort of enjoyed the control that such innovations as pagination and blogging afforded me to completely control my output, personally. But the more you’re fiddling with getting a photo just right or reworking a page, the less time you spend making sure you know what you’re writing about and writing it as well as you can (not to mention editing video, which takes a ridiculous amount of time). Which is not good.
By the way, I shot this with my new camera I got for Christmas, which has awesome resolution compared to my old one that died. But you’ll note that it’s a little hard to aim from the hip or from a tabletop because it doesn’t have the tilting monitor window (which you can see me using to good effect with Obama on that header photo I use). The bits where I turned it on myself were even worse — right up the nose. They don’t make them like my old camera anymore. Sigh. I’ll adjust.
Gee, Brad, remember the “backshop”? Where guys with Xactos did the “paste-up” and the place smelled of molten wax?
Those guys disappeared with pagination, but the work load simply transferred from the backshop to the frontshop.
Get yourself a baby octopus tripod. They’re only a couple of bucks.
Did the report on WACH ever air? Did anyone see it? I don’t see it on the Web site…
Here’s a link to the story on the Web. Thanks to news manager Bryan Cox for the link.
Fascinating. I just watched the video, and the B-roll on it, while not all that old, was WAY out of date because it was from when a lot more people worked in the newsroom.
You’ll see both Bill Robinson (referenced above) and Jim Hammond on the footage. Both of them took buyouts in 2008, which was like three or four (or is it five) rounds of reductions ago…
Oh, and Burl — yes, I miss the old backshops.
For you laypeople — the composing room folks lost THEIR jobs in the 90s, when we went to pagination. You just didn’t hear about THAT because the backshop folks were invisible to readers.
I was just saying that as awful as that was, the one upside was being able to do the page myself, which I cherished as a control freak. The downside (to me) was that I had to do the pages myself (sometimes), which meant less time for researching and writing. The downside for the backshop guys (and yes, they were practically all guys) was that their highly-developed skills became irrelevant, and went away forever. At least some of what I did is still marketable. They were not nearly so lucky.
Actually, at that time most of the backshop guys were given buyouts or early retirement.
What these guys could do with an Xacto and a steel ruler was remarkable.
There are buyouts and there are buyouts. I still think it’s better to have a job.
My favorite composing room figure to recall was Henry Cambron at The Jackson Sun in Jackson, TN. Henry was near retirement (he had landed in Normandy on D-Day) when I started out in the business, and he dealt with us snotty young editors with a mixture of avuncular grumpiness and mock menace.
Henry’s favorite weapon wasn’t the XActo, but the biggest pair of scissors I ever saw in my life. He kept them in a holster on his hip, and he could cut a full column of type perfectly with one snap of its jaws.
Whenever one of us entered the backshop with that “new lede” look in our eyes as he was putting the finishing touches on a page, his face would cloud over and he’d draw his scissors from his hip, wield them under our noses and demand to know what we were about. Which was pretty intimidating until his face broke into a grin and he said, “What do we need to do?”
It was sort of like the relationship between a particularly experienced master bosun and midshipmen in Jack Aubrey’s day…