Comment on Luigi Mangione Content Is a Challenge for Social Media Moderators - B…
drwho@beehaw.org 3 weeks agoThey also have to keep their editors happy. One of an editor’s jobs is to push back on the folks who write articles, and occasionally rewrite parts of them. And the editors have folks above them in the food chain pulling the strings. News companies aren’t monoliths, they’re spiderwebs of people pushing and pulling on other people because there are obligations all over the place.
To put it another way, “You can’t say that or you’re fired. You’ll never work in this city again.” And, because there aren’t many celebrity journalists, it’s a very real risk.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Sadly, “you’ll never work in this city again” has been true for my entire career. What are you going to do? Walk across Main Street to the other paper?
But it has never been an editor’s job to “push back on the folks who write articles,” which I thought would be the worst part of that sentence; literally, rewriting is what editors do. We don’t push back on staff, we push back on copy. A minor omission here, a glaring hole there, and – as a last resort – spiking a story until questions are answered.
No one has felt any job security in this industry for at least 15 years. “You can’t say that” probably cuts both ways at this point.