Thank goodness it's not my job

Reading these three articles reminds me of what my general manager at my television station has to worry about day in and day out. At one meeting not long ago he tried to explain to us journalists why it's good for the station to have debt and it's not always a bad thing. Needless to say it was confusing and most of us brushed it off knowing that it wasn't our job to worry about the financial aspect of the company, we just had to worry about doing what the company asked us to do in order to make them money.

I think chapter 12 (p. 243) points out a very good idea when it comes to improving a company, investing in it. We are in a time when media is changing and journalists need additional tools to be able to provide the “new media” aspects to the audience. Recently the company I work for has invested in numerous items including laptops, flips cameras, better cell phones for still pictures, and hard drives to make our jobs “easier”. I put “easier” in quotation marks because what it has done is actually add onto our work load while making our jobs “easier” to provide that extra content now required of us to the audience. In the end though it has made a big improvement on what we are able to post to our website and has allowed us to increase our frequency of getting fresh content on there.

A perfect example of a company that choose not to invest is the local CBS affiliate KEYE. They were recently purchased by an investment firm which has no stake in the news business, rather just in profits. Many people have been let go and changes have occurred in the name of making money and not for the sake of journalism. It will be interesting over time to see where that takes them.