I received an e-mail today from a reader who had a story to share about being stifled by corporate and management. The good news for journalism is that this person isn’t down on journalism itself, just some journalism companies. Unfortunately, this is not a unique story in today’s journalism world:

I’m beginning to liken my job to that of working at McDonald’s. It’s your basic fast-food fare that feeds the same stuff everyday, and we’re stifled by corporate and management to do things their way without fail. It’s the same culture with a few people who want to do better.

During a recent natural disaster the site did very with direct traffic, garnering more than 1 million page views. The site normally does about 200,000 a day. 1 million sounds pretty good, but it could have been more (updates on inclement weather are big traffic drivers):

Anyway, my boss (pretty much there for the paycheck and hours) decides not to stream our TV coverage because “he wanted to have our helicopter coverage without our station’s bug). People come to our site during work and they sure don’t have TVs in their offices, so why wouldn’t they expect to have our breaking news coverage streaming, too. We’ve done it for every other event where I’ve been working. That takes me back to my analogy. I feel like my bosses were satisfied because they got an extra Big Mac in their combo when I feel we could have had a steak.

Note: I have edited this post at the request of the original author to protect their identity better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under State of journalism, angry journalists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.