The poor Vicad is having a kind of identity crisis, and I guess I ran up against it. When I left the newsroom two years ago, the then-editor offered me a deal to do a blog and write one feature story a week, said they didn't want to lose my work completely. I didn't ask for it; I was happy to shake the dust of the place off my feet, but it was convenient, I had scope to write pretty much anything I wanted, and they didn't mess with my copy too much.
Since that time, the paper is kinda trying to figure out who they are. They lurch between being Weekly World News and My Weekly Reader, chupacabras and maudlin mush. They have been insisting on stories no longer than 15 inches, which isn't too bad for news but is terribly restrictive for features stuff, the stories I write. Idea was you could plead for exception to go over 15 inches on an ad hoc basis. It was simply too unattractive a way to work. Those people didn't like the way I wrote and I couldn't abide the way they edited. I think the paper looks like an 8th-grade social-science text book, with the short, short stories all tarted up with doctored photo art and lots of tiny little boxes with factoids and Web addresses. We'll all be happier with me gone. We can hope the paper will find its way back to some kind of coherent way of being.
At least I won't have to listen to people complain about the stock tables being gone.
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5 comments:
one less set of shackles on the bon ve aunt of Cdrift
I want to write something exceptional here.
I guess I can start with this:
In high school, I really want to be a "news writer." Then I had a mid(mid)-life crisis and joined the Army.
The feeling stuck with me until a few years ago when I stopped reading any newspaper.
If I wanted to read something "in depth," I had to go online to do so. I don't want to single out any one paper, but I'll just say that I usually have to do a yahoo search for a subject to read a more in depth (larger? longer?) article about things sometimes.
As for writing - I found that I have horrendous grammer, punctuation, and spelling. Turns out you need all three to make a go of it anywhere.
Damn the man.
I guess it would be safe to assume that proofreading is something else of importance to a writing career.
What?! You aren't entertained by stories of the Chupacabra and Bat Boy (sorry, I guess that was the other tabloid)? And you don't dig having what little substance there is watered down and dumbed down to a complete mush for you! Why, I never!! Seriously, glad to see you doing the free bird thing, YOU are much better off without the VICAD, not the other way around.
It's certainly the vicad's loss! Now the only reason to read it is on Wednesdays for Reese's book reviews. Thanks for creating this avenue to get our daily fix of Grey-Beard Loon!
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