It's amazing what shitty management can do. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a journalist. I wrote for the school paper all through high school. I interned at the city paper, and even wrote some articles that were front page. During my junior year my voice changed and it turned out that I had a decent radio voice. Some might say a face for it too. lol Either way, I started angling to go into broadcasting, and majored in it during college.
Fast forward a few years and I was offered a job at the local radio station network where I grew up. It was a great chance to go back to my home town and be in the city where my girlfriend (now wife of 20 years next month) lived. All was good…for a bit.
Now I knew radio can be shit. On air staff makes pennies creating the content that the sales people sell and get huge pay days. The amount of work is even more one sided. I regularly worked 70-80 hour weeks making in the 25k range while they maybe worked 7 hours a day and raked in six figures. I was part of a team that took our news division from something that just read press releases to a major player in the region's news market. The newspapers were scared…and respected us. That didn't matter, we were nothing more than resources to be chewed up and spit out.
Towards the end I was running the news operations at 23…which was cool, but exhausting. I'd go in to work at 3:30 in the morning to get the news casts ready and on a good day I'd get home at 4 pm. On council meeting days I'd get home at 11:30 pm… then right back to work at 3:30. I was the oldest, grumpiest 20-something I knew, and I was having health issues as a result.
It all came to a head when the station's owner decided to run for national office having never held any elected position. Ever. You know the type; runs a successful business so now every idea that pops into his shiny head must be brilliant and evidence of his infallibility.
Well he decided that at no time should we ever report on the incumbent…which is ridiculous. If that official does something newsworthy, it should be reported. And people were noticing the one sided nature of coverage, and it was affecting my reputation. I spoke with the GM who told me he doesn't care about my journalistic integrity, and basically not to worry about my reputation because it doesn't matter since I work for him, he essentially owned me. Riiight…
THEN the owner called me and ripped me a new one for having the audacity to question the GM, and said he was going to lose the election and it would be my fault. I saw where this was going…
The very next morning when the GM was back in the office, I turned in my resignation. I had nothing lined up and that girlfriend who had since become my wife was pregnant with our first child. In retrospect it seems like a dumb decision, but it also worked out. I kid you not, a half an hour later I got a call from someone I knew saying they had a PR position open and he wanted to talk. Since started my new career which turns 18 this year, as well as my daughter.
Their news division went back to crap, and the owner lost the election. Big time. Didn't even carry his home town. Maybe not every idea is a good one. I still miss broadcasting at times, it had its fun moments. But nothing is worth that kind of abuse.