"The rivalry is with ourself."- Luciano Pavarotti
Rivalry is a large part of the newsroom, you honestly wouldn't think by the look of things but if you dug deep enough and joined us you'd know that it is a larger part of the newsroom than you think.There are the simple rivalries over stories, pages, and photos between writers, editors, and photographers and there are more rivalries that develop due to stories and just rivalries because you've managed to piss us off. Over the past three years that I've been apart of the staff, we've developed some strange rivalries that have progressed over time.
The rivalries between us staff members seem to dissipate depending on the day while our other rivalries seem to linger throughout the year unresolved. When we have rivalries in our newspaper, it's over little graphic things or over story and its usually resolved quite easy since most of us are pretty good friends. The biggest disputes always arise when somebody goes a little too far and starts to take action of what they want and really start to annoy some people or the largest thing is when a writer lies to an editor. The biggest no-no in our newspaper is not to lie to your editor about deadlines, or else it gets ugly. Overall, most of our little pity problems have no affect on us and at the end of the day we're all friends again, while some of our out of staff rivalries still live on.
One of our largest rivarlies is with another production in the school [not going to mention names] but it has went on since the day I've joined until this day.
We all have theories of why we're considered rivals, but the biggest reason is that we share rooms and labs. The fact that we share the Mac lab, seems to really keep us arguing and fighting over little things. For example, in the lab we have a "wall of shame" and a "wall of fame" which we created to put stuff we did and didn't like, and last year we had quite a problem with that once they started putting stuff on there [and after one of our editors put the front cover of one of their publications on the wall of shame]. The rivalry between us just seems to stay lingering around throughout the year over small little things.
The rivalry between the two publications just seems as if it should happen. At the end of the day, all of us respect our publications and the work that go into it and I think that we both lose track of that when we actually think about it. The rivalry does tend to be within ourselves since most the time we're too blind to realize that together, we're just the journalism kids and that either way we still put tons of work into something that we're both fans of.
I found this post very interesting. Because I conceptualize journalism as such a collaborative space, I never stop to think about how rivalry and competition can affect a publication. When I read your post, I immediately began to think about the larger state of journalism and the competition that must occur to have a piece published by a major newspaper or magazine. The competition must be especially fierce in today's current economic state as newspapers struggle to make ends meet.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen the movie "All the President's Men?" Generally, it's about the Watergate scandal, but I think you may find it interesting as it provides a lot of commentary on the difficulty of getting a piece to publication. You might also find it interesting to compare how journalism worked during the 70s to how journalism functions within your classroom. Just one movie about journalism that came to mind.
I'm interested to see where you take this blog!
-Ms. O'Connor