The City Pages’ Britt Robson interviews a range of Strib staffers on their reactions to the paper’s recent sale.

Rochelle Olson – she of the piece on Alan Fine’s domestic abuse arrest which, for space reasons, neglected to mention the salient facts of the arrest’s expungement, the lack of any physical evidence against Fine, or later convictions against Fine’s soon-to-be ex that one might expect would give the reader a complete picture of the case – notes:

“There is enough anger to go around, but from what I hear, it is mainly directed at Pruitt and Anders,” says [Olson], a metro reporter who has worked at the paper for seven years. “There’s a lot of derisive talk about Pruitt, because he was painted in other media as the golden boy, this tanned San Franciscan up-and-comer who liked rock and roll music and talked about a new paradigm. He and Anders led people to believe they cared about journalism. And when push came to shove, all they cared about was the bottom line.”

It might explain the key facts being left out of the Fine piece; people were too busy provisioning their lifeboats.

Well, it’s more palatable than “all parties involved were in the bag for Keith Ellison”, isn’t it?

There are, though, a couple of interesting quotes; I’ll add the emphases. First, reporter Mike Kaszuba:

“We need to squeeze out another 10 years to stay in this industry. And you sit back and say, wow, I wonder if there is another 10 years left in this industry? We are the Watergate babies, from back when it was cool and sexy to be a journalist. We were naive, goofy idealists in a way. Now it is about dollars and cents. The thing I got into it for, I’m not sure it’s even among the top five reasons this place runs anymore.

And Biz beat reporter Mike Meyers:

I didn’t go into this job to retire at 50 or to make a fortune. I did it because I liked it and I enjoyed the work. It is a calling. And over time, it has become more and more of a regular job where you show up do your job and leave.

I remember going into radio, and staying in it for years after I should have left, because it was cool and sexy (and, lest I forget, because I loved doing the job, most of it). I never had the baggage of a “calling”, although with talk radio I had the impediment of it being the first serious love of my life, which is similar, I think.

And I remember the realization; the world doesn’t have to fund my fun, to say nothing of my love. And anyone who follows a “calling” has to accept the notion that not everyone will support it; just monks are dependent on the largesse of a church or institution, newspaper reporters with a “calling” are dependent on the world valuing that calling sufficiently to keep them, or some number of them, employed.

So why has that calling been so devalued in the past 20 years?

I’d have loved to have heard the answers Britt Robson got to that question.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 7:16 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.