Newsroom tirades

[jljzen]

I had a huge argument with my former managing editor. Actually, her title was ambiguous, so managing editor isn't correct. It might be better to describe her as the former overlord of the foreign desk, which I work on. With her, this was a frequent occurence that involved more or less every staffer at some point.
I'll spare you the details of my encounter, but I'm curious to know how often arguments/tirades explode in your respective newsrooms...

[editer]

Not so many since I got older and mellower.

[(sic) 'em]

God, if only they did. My newsroom is infected with the opposite disease: Passive-aggressive disorder. Sometimes (make that most of the time) I think if people here just had it out in a good old-fashioned public shouting match, a lot more would get done, and quicker, too.

[Mike O'Connell]

Well now you've got our curiousity piqued, can you say the nature of the argument?

[jljzen]

Nah, I'm more interested to know if this is a common occurrence or not.

[Neil Holdway]

We have few major arguments but fairly regular bickering. Lots of too-many-hands-in-the-kitchen kind of stuff -- which incidentally resulted in a note from our ME today to a few of us saying, basically, you gotta get along so that we can have a plan earlier in the process.

But can a bunch of journalists ever agree? (This is largely rhetorical griping on my part.)

[Jim Thomsen]

I think that a certain amount of pushback, especially in an ever-diminishing newsroom, is not only inevitable but healthy.

For example, in my newsroom, we have two dayside local news editors (including one who reads this site regularly). I'm the night-and-weekend editor. Our afternoon news-budget planning sessions occasionally get a bit testy because I want to make sure every detail is accounted for before the daysiders leave each day — it's a pain in the ass to find that pages are under-budgeted, that art is not accounted for, that stories on the budget are not slotted, that stories that ARE slotted need serious Editing 101 editing, that I have vast acreage of newshole that must be filled with wire beyond the wire's capacity to provide quality stories. So I ask sharp questions and I complain that more needs to be done and sometimes I challenge the quality of the stories on the budget.

I'm sure the daysiders think I'm a jerk, and I'm not sure that they're not right. Once-collegial personal relationships have deteriorated into a chillingly polite tolerance. All I'm saying in my defense is that I'm not being an jerk just to be a jerk — I'm being a jerk mostly for the benefit of our readers, and a little bit to protect my own turf so that I'm not in a perpetual state of cleaning up the careless messes of others who can't wait to go home as early as possible each night.

And I guess I don't really apologize for either motive.

That said, while things have come close a couple of times, there haven't been any full-blown tirades. Yet.