Thursday 25 June 2009

Suicide ain't painless

Today I witnessed the ultimate death of my newspapers.
The money hungry whores who pay themselves vastly inflated salaries to run this company have signed the death warrant and now it is just a matter of time before the advertisers carry out their wishes.
In their infinite wisdom, my so-called bosses decided to reduce pagination over summer in order to cut costs. So far so sensible. It is a season where newspapers are always likely to make a loss. I expected to lose a few editorial pages as part of this drop in size and was actually looking forward to taking the foot off the gas a little and having a bit of fun.
The plans for my new editions landed on my desk this morning and to be honest I felt like walking out there and then.
Instead of a few back of the book pages being dropped, the fucktards in charge have fundamentally destroyed the layout of my papers.
Full page ads are normally forbidden from the front of the book in order to give our dear readers the impression what we bring out is actually a newspaper. Now they litter my early pages.
Back of the book far from being pared down is obliterated.
I proudly boast a post bag that fills itself thrice-fold on a weekly basis, such is the debate and respect our newspapers hold among the public.
I could devote two full pages a week to them and often try to. Instead under our ‘new look’ streamlined edition I get a half. Barely enough for a quarter of my post bag......
A new ad appears on the front page as well just to add to my growing sense of fury.
I have about a quarter of the space I traditionally had with page shapes that look as though they have been put in as an afterthought to pad out the lovely advertisements.
It’s a fucking joke and it is taking all my composure to not walk in and smash the MDs head in with my lap top.
This is a sure fire way to destroy all of the hard work, respect, and kudos, my team and I have put into this paper making it, what I think is, a bloody good weekly read.
You may as well shut the fucker down today. These short term fuckers have no interest in newspapers or what they are actually for. They just care about the bottom line and making their monthly figures look good.
Over the last six months this company has instigated a raft of cost cutting measures which have all added to the intense pressure of this job. But we have coped but this latest initiative is one money grubbing policy too far.
I’m no commie and I understand times are hard and company’s have to make money but this is fucking ridiculous.
To have such little respect for our readers is what really makes me laugh. Do these utter fucking management idiots think readers won’t notice that it only takes them a few minutes to flick through the tiny amount of editorial we can give them as opposed to the 20+ good sized pages we spill blood each week packing full of news and features before.
The readers and advertisers found out about our 'cost-cutting' distribution cuts quick enough. Especially when paperboys got sacked by the dozen.
The cunts claim this is a short term measure. I think they are full of shit. I think they are lying rat faced weasels who should fucking kill themselves.
The paper will become a laughing stock in a few short weeks, just another free sheet chucked in the bin.
That really fucking hurts.
I pride myself on the papers I bring out. It’s a direct reflection of what I am capable of doing. And I used to hold my head up high in the towns my papers come out in because I was proud of what we do.
Now I just really want to cry.

2 comments:

  1. I sympathise. From the way our local newspaper has trimmed itself of all news, upped the 'advertorial' content, lost interest in any actual local stories and seems to shamelessly trot out typo after spelling mistake after typo (in headlines, no less), I think they've gotten rid of all the editorial staff (or they all walked out).

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  2. Good luck! I am a Japanese journalst and was illegaly fired by Thomson Reuters two weeks ago. I'll update the battle report against the company. https://twitter.com/shangyezhao

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