Kiyoshi Martinez – nerdlusus blog – 10,000 Angry Journalists (and counting)

Posted
December 6, 2009

10,000 Angry Journalists (and counting)

My anonymous forum for media professionals hit a milestone today: 10,000 comments from angry journalists.

To begin, let’s look at some statistics. Since February 2007, AngryJournalist.com has had 607,129 page loads, 323,185 unique visitors, 244,455 first-time visitors and 78,730 returning visitors.

For a site that started as a concept executed over a weekend and grew by simply sending an e-mail to a few friends, posting a link on Facebook and Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing, I’m proud of my little experiment and it’s exceeded any expectations I originally conceived.

While I originally started the project to see if others had the same feelings about journalism that several friends and myself shared and to compare notes with a fantastic study by Prof. Scott Reinardy (then at Ball State University, now at the University of Kansas), the site began to take on a unique life of its own and it’s been quite an interesting journey to watch it grow.

The Drudge Report picked up on an AFP article profiling the site, which momentarily turned it into a battleground between angry journalists and those angry AT journalists — leading me to implement harsher comment approval standards.

Recently, one commenter mentioned they were contemplating suicide, which led to me tracking down the commenter’s identity — something I never imagined I’d have to ever do, nor did I want to have to do — and reporting it to the police. Fortunately, things turned out OK.

I hope the site’s acted as a form of stress relief for journalists in what continues to be an extremely challenging — if not bleak — environment. Despite not working in the industry anymore, I do empathize with those still grinding away under a Sword of Damocles. With 86,800 losing their jobs in the print media industry alone during the past 12 months (not including broadcast and online), it’s hard to find optimism.

I don’t have any special knowledge or answers of what will “save journalism” or when the industry will finally hit rock bottom. All I know is that journalists continue to post on the site, day after day, about their struggles. The burnout described by Reinardy will probably continue and I doubt at this point we’ll ever see that reversed.

But there’s the case of Angry Journalist #10,000, who is one of the few to leave their frustrations behind and lucky enough to find a promising opportunity:

I’m cautiously optimistic right now. I just started what seems like a dream job, getting a decent wage to write what I want for smart people. I’m just looking back on the place I left, a family-owned daily run entirely – without exception – by gibbering idiots. Seriously. And I think that situation may be replicated at many papers, contributing greatly to the industry’s mess.

At my old paper, the idiot son of an idiot son inherited the business, and demonstrated his idiocy by hiring drunks, cowards and pompous dimwits for all executive positions. The competent people are all at the bottom of the totem pole, and struggle mightily to put out something credible every day. If the top half-dozen people at the place were fired, the paper would only improve – and the budget would be cut in half. Literally.

At how many papers are half the resources sucked up by people who contribute nothing? I’m willing to bet it’s a lot. If we could all shed that parasitic weight, I think we’d be doing just fine.

I wish Angry Journalist #10,000 and the rest of them the best. They sincerely will need it.

Previous posts about AngryJournalist.com by me:

Kiyoshi Martinez – nerdlusus blog the geek wants out

10,000 Angry Journalists (and counting)