Arrogance of the Times

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/03/arrogance-of-the-times

Courtesy of Jim Romenesko comes this view into the mindset of the top three editors of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet, and John Geddes, as expressed in their message to their staff about union negotiations: "The New York Times stands almost alone in being able to offer talented journalists a promising and fulfilling career."

The subtext is that the Times is the only game in town, and that the employees there should be happy with whatever they are offered, because they don't have many other good other options. There may be a grain of truth in that — I said as much in an earlier post here on the Times negotiations with the union, when I wrote that the protesting Times employees "should feel lucky they still have jobs" — but surely there's a way to make that point without disparaging competing news organizations.

For the benefit of Times employees who might feel trapped by the message from "Jill, Dean, and John" — first names only when delivering that iron-fist-in-velvet-glove management message — here are just a few of the many other places (I am sure I am forgetting some) that can offer talented journalists promising and fulfilling careers:

• The Wall Street Journal
• ProPublica
• Texas Monthly
• The New Yorker
• Time magazine
• Sports Illustrated
• NPR
• New York magazine
• Politico
• A web site that you start yourself, like I did with FutureOfCapitalism.com
• Yahoo! News
• Nonfiction book writing
• USA Today
• ABC News
• CBS News
• NBC News
• ESPN
• PBS's "Frontline" or NewsHour
• The Atlantic Monthly and its affiliated Web sites
• The Associated Press
• Fox News
• Bloomberg News
• Reuters
• BuzzFeed
• NewsBeast
• The Economist
• The Financial Times

As for just how promising and fulfilling the careers on offer at the Times are, the journalists there will have to judge for themselves, but in my experience when my job has genuinely been promising and fulfilling it hasn't usually been necessary for management to spend a lot of time reminding me of that fact.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator J. for sending the tip.

by Editor  |  Mar 1, 2012 at 4:57 pm Related Topics:  Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list