No Surprise Here

At the end of the packets Joe brought to a Growth Group meeting in April, he had listed the number of hours of work and the amount the Missourian was paying him.

100 hours. $9,000. For just our group.

For a moment, I put aside the $90/hour rate he was getting, and just focused on the hours. I multiplied 100 by two (we have two groups), and then divided by about 30 days (the time he had until his mid-May deadline).

I came up with maybe 6 or 7 hours of work. Each day, every day, including weekends.

To put it kindly, I didn't understand where those hours were coming from — I never saw his job as that labor-intensive. I spoke about it with two or three of my classmates. I ranted about it the following morning with a former K-12 beat reporter over breakfast. It came up in a conversation with my father, my editor, my climbing partner, on a date...

It didn't help that this page detailing his pay followed an entire page devoted to web jargon about the "implementation" of a link box. I wasn't impressed. If we wanted a link box, we could use Wordpress. For free. Google API is also available to us. For free.

Why do I care? This money was extra, it wasn't coming out of my course fee, it was earmarked.

I put so much work into the Missourian, that it physically hurts to see resources being wasted.

Despite all of this, never ever did I raise my concerns about Joe and BrightTree in class, or with Tom.

I did suggest that on the peer evaluations we evaluate BrightTree. I hoped that we could voice our concerns there. Turns out, it was too late.

I hope this experience leads to the following change: Though we are students, we WORK at the Missourian, and it is our tuition, not subscription and advertising revenues that keeps this daily going. There needs to be a way for us to voice concerns about the people we work with, without fear of offending someone.

THE QUESTIONS:
Was it worthwhile? No. I learned and did little compared to what I could have accomplished had I been allowed to focus on beat reporting.

What, if anything, did you learn? To trust my perceptions more. I'm not sure yet if I've learned to report those perceptions to the group in hopes of change, or to use them to selfishly protect myself.

Would you do it again? No. Creating a searchable resource for the community is important. But I'd like to choose to do that by taking a course in it. Having it posed to me again and again as what I have to do instead of reporting was painful.

What would you change? Let me report. Make me innovate and lead within my beat in Advanced Reporting. Let me take a Shells class if I choose.

What would you keep? The class discussions and the blog. Especially a longer discussion about whether our J-school creates foot soldiers or leaders. And how we can take reporting beyond the traditional. We should have read more on the theory of journalism than spinning our wheels on shells.