In my first newsroom, at a small town in central Pennsylvania, we had a slogan on the bulletin board: "Get it first, get it fast, get it right." All three parts were absolutely required. If you got something wrong, or late, not only did you get a dressing-down from the editor, but you also got the cold shoulder from your reporter pals: you'd let them down. Sloth on the job was unforgiveable: no matter how boring a small-town municipal meeting was, the thought of missing a story, and then having to explain why to your boss and peers, kept you in your seat. You got burned once misspelling Jon Smythe's name as John Smith, and forever more you learned to ask every single person how to spell his or her name, no matter how obvious it appeared.
We reporters griped constantly, we played hookey from staff meetings and we drank at lunch, but we had a sense of pride in our work far out of proportion to our $180-a-week salaries (perks: free coffee, notebooks and film).
I'm not sure that exists at any news organization except at the most local level anymore: this afternoon two of the major news outlets blundered by announcing that an arrest had been made in the Boston atrocities. I don't want to speculate about how that happened, but I can't help comparing such increasingly common sloppiness to our standards at a little 6-day-a-week paper in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, staffed by underpaid 20-somethings.
I remember one Friday night, one of my colleagues thought he'd give his editor a chuckle while typing up the birth announcements: he wrote that our sports editor, a bachelor, had had octuplets at the local hospital. The editor didn't read the birth announcements and just sent them through to be typeset. Monday morning, of course, we started fielding excited calls about the octuplets.
The hapless reporter was fired by lunchtime, no questions asked. Which is as it should have been.
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