{"id":11968,"date":"2013-08-27T02:18:53","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T01:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/?p=11968"},"modified":"2016-09-12T18:39:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T17:39:27","slug":"tales-from-the-grind-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/?p=11968","title":{"rendered":"Tales From The Grind #7"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Grind_inline\"<\/h2>\n

Drop the Dead Donkey<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Newsrooms are fucked up. Everyone watches everyone else to see who will have their Michael Douglas in Falling Down <\/em>moment. They\u2019re waiting for you to snap or get the sack so they can move into your seat. Unlike other corporate environments where you\u2019re stabbed in the back, news hacks place a sword in front of you and push you on it.<\/p>\n

Having spent over a decade rising from runner to deputy foreign editor (or \u201cdesk jockey\u201d as I call it), I\u2019ve been privy to what happens when insecurity complexes get regular doses of testosterone and Pavlovian dog treats.<\/p>\n

Ten years ago I was a broadcast journalist on the lower rungs of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s television news empire at Sky News. I was a text producer, writing the words that went on those little \u201cbreaking news\u201d straps that dance across your TV screen. I pushed the button that went \u201cwhoosh\u201d to tell you all about the bombs that dropped on Baghdad. I translated all the hot air at the UN into two lines of bite-sized information. The \u201ctextprod\u201d was Twitter before Twitter. How very hipster.<\/p>\n

One morning, I was at my desk preparing a string of rewritten newswires for the next bulletin. Sky\u2019s then head of output, John Ryley, stamped over to my station. John isn\u2019t very tall. And he\u2019s cursed by the same speech affliction Jonathan Ross has of pronouncing his \u201cr\u201ds like \u201cw\u201ds. He listens to punk and has a secret life of liking rather cool things. His manner of dress is less than managerial – preferring comfy, moth-masticated jumpers to the executive suit. He also struck fear into the hearts of the more ruthlessly ambitious news producer (a fact often used by other producers to manipulate their co-workers). His best mate from school is Eddie Izzard and I once caught him humming \u201cAnarchy in the UK\u201d in the corridor outside the edit suites.<\/p>\n

I digress. John Ryley stamped towards my desk. He was clutching a fax.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you read this?\u201d he said, depositing three pages on my desk.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s in Mandarin, John,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you can read it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m Filipino, John. We use a different sort of squiggly language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some years later I was walking past his office. I\u2019d since moved on to working on the Foreign Desk where I was once jokingly told before entering Gaza that kidnapping would be good for my career. He was in conference with a freshly recruited producer – newsroom plankton with his sights set on greater things.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeah!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, John?\u201d I said staring at a poster advertising the Sky News Beijing bureau in a Chinese propaganda style.<\/p>\n

\u201cGary Gilmore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is he?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA murderer executed in America who requested his eyes be used for transplants. Hence the punk song by the Adverts, Looking Through Gary Gilmore\u2019s Eyes<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then shot me a \u201cyou can fuck off now, I\u2019ve proved my point\u201d look. I suspect John made a cultural reference that totally passed by the young producer and needed to show that he wasn\u2019t old.<\/p>\n

I despaired at the lack of general knowledge from anyone under 30. Plucked from the finest schools and thrust into graduate programmes they still wrote round-robin emails like \u201cLeonard Cohen\u2019s version of Hallelujah<\/em>\u00a0is on the server under P12345\u201d. I replied – with snark – \u201cIt\u2019s not his version. It\u2019s his bloody song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not get into what I said to the overnight reporter who asked me to tell her \u201cvery quickly\u201d the history of the Palestine\/Israel conflict. The Middle East reporter was reluctant to send over a breakfast news package so the overnight hack got the job while we tried to persuade them. The overnight hack cobbled together paragraphs from newswires and Wikipedia. Offended that their patch was being sullied by some \u201cRoedean girl with more ponies than sense\u201d, our Middle East reporter knuckled down to craft a minute-and-a-half voice track which we laid over agency pictures and archive.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The world\u2019s media descended on India\u2019s largest city with a circus of reporters, producers, researchers and engineers. Sky sent over multiple teams patched together with people from different bureaux around the world, including a new (and our only) reporter who bore Indian heritage. His producer texted me \u201cWhat the fuck is he doing here? He can\u2019t even speak the language!\u201d<\/p>\n

Common sense lapses, obvs. The accounts department once sent out the following notice:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been brought to my attention that people have been using the words \u201cbribe\u201d or \u201cfraud\u201d when submitting their expense claims. Whilst in most cases this has arisen because people are covering fraud or bribery cases, please can everybody refrain from using these words in future. Sky doesn\u2019t tolerate the use of bribery or fraud in the workplace and has to investigate each case.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In an office where it seemed the primary journalistic concern was one\u2019s own position in the corporate structure and not the rose-tinted idealism of telling stories to make people understand the world a bit better, the foreign desk was a haven. It\u2019s where you found journalists that still gave a shit – albeit a jaded shit laced with sarcasm. It\u2019s also where you found journalists who could care less about court cases and weather stories and seethed resentment when made to cover them. Foreign news requires a macabre sense of humour littered with obscenity. This was the same industry that held an \u201coh what a lovely war\u201d party after George W Bush declared the Iraq War over in May 2003.<\/p>\n

Lebanon. 2006. Another war. I was trying to locate one of our field producers in Tyre to co-ordinate an update and a live feed. The Israelis were flying bomb-laden sorties over our satellite position.<\/p>\n

\u201cNick. Where\u2019ve you been?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went down to the beach. Some American journos wrote \u201cUN\u201d in the sand. I modified it a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI put a \u201cc\u201d in the front of it and a \u201ct\u201d at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recently texted an old friend reporting from Syria.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow are you mate?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt Syrian border. Mega death.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key to learning how a newsroom ticks is understanding that everyone resents everybody else. Those at the bottom rungs of the ladder try to kick everyone else off in their upward climb. Those at the top try to saw the rungs in half so the lower orders can\u2019t get near them. Somewhere in the middle, common bonds are formed. The sort that you hear braying out of the bar at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem where your surname suddenly adopts a public school modification like \u201cSmithy\u201d. They\u2019re genuine, human bonds. But it\u2019s best remembered that these are the people whose words and images determine what you know about the world around you. It\u2019s a clusterfuck. A psychotherapist\u2019s wet dream..<\/p>\n

By Leah Borromeo | @monstris<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Drop the Dead Donkey Newsrooms are fucked up. Everyone watches everyone else to see who will have their Michael Douglas in Falling Down moment. They\u2019re waiting for you to snap or get the sack so they can move into your seat. Unlike other corporate environments where you\u2019re stabbed in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[97,994,1160,973,995,1166],"class_list":["post-11968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tales-from-the-grind","tag-bbc","tag-journalism","tag-news","tag-ot22","tag-sky","tag-tales-from-the-grind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Grind_slider.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11968"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12236,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11968\/revisions\/12236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoccupiedtimes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}