In a recent post about the Post Dispatch and their financial troubles, I put a call out for anyone that works there to tell us what its like. That call was answered by a commenter and after reading it, I felt it needed the attention a full post brings. The question posed was “What’s the vibe like there?”
The vibe is not knowing…a numbness that has you just fulfill your duties and go home. It used to be a vibrant place when I first got there, but now there’s alot of empty space, the people who would stop by and say hi don’t have the time to anymore, and everything changes some more in an almost predictable pattern. You can hear it in voices, see it in eyes, and every meeting or email from certain people makes your heart jump into your throat and stay there until your survival is assured.
It’s like riding a corpse into the ground and I hate it.
ps.I’ve never worked with more professional & wonderfully unique people, they are all a delight to know and it kills a piece of me every time a batch of them are let go.
At least we have Obama.
This kind of thing sucks. There’s no doubt about the quality of the staff there, but mix together a shaky economy (which always hits advertising hard) and a revolution of sorts in publishing and you don’t have a great environment for newspapers to stay as fat as they were.
Any other employees or bystanders want to chime in on this?