Lost My Editing Job

[cenacle]

sir,

i was never going to contact you again after what you did to me, save for if i needed a professional confirmation of employment there, which you are legally bound to give...but one thing has been nagging at me...

you told me i am not qualified to edit newspapers at a "high level"...the truth is you don't know what my background is or what kind of editing work i have done...you never asked me once, and i assumed that like everyone else at that solipsistic rust of a place you had no interest...but to sit there and tell me there is any kind of editing i am not qualified to do is something i will not abide from you or anyone else...

i saw how editing went on there, the so-called "high level" editing...i saw the biases and prejudices built into the system...the inconsistencies...over the months i simply accepted that what i saw as sloppiness was there considered a sort of convention...what you and carole and chris and fran preferred were seen as somehow 'right' whether industry standards & practices confirmed this or not...

let me tell you: i've professionally edited more kinds of things than you will dream of and the number of times i had to bite my tongue over how poorly things were written & edited there was countless...but i was always kept at bay from the real process, never allowed into that airless system of several old people so jealous of their little turfs that the possibility of someone coming in and saying something new was perceived as a threat...

you can say of me what you will, and you have certainly done your worst to my life unless you choose to contest my receiving a pittance of unemployment compensation to keep from starving, but i will not allow you to casually insult my professional integrity...saving money to impress your masters may help you back into that editor's seat you so obviously and deeply covet, but it won't save your soul deep down...and all those months of treating me like some kind of unwanted child before finally being able to bloodlessly dispose of me will rest uneasily in your heart too...

the new haven advocate has no more to do with real progressive alternative grassroots politics or living than the register you mock or your courant owners or even that play thing all of you so feared...it is at its best moments the mild tremble of washed-out liberals who have car payments and children's dental bills to pay...perhaps it has its place, but it would be blindness to estimate it as something greater than the small thing that it is...

the people in this nation and world who will turn it around would never stand an atmosphere like yours...its pettiness, backbiting, bottom line bullshit...the way one turns on another the moment it is ripe to do so...and frankly i felt this way long before i was replaced with an intern and a coterie of freelancers who don't get benefits...your actions crushed me, but i was not surprised...i'd come to expect nothing better...

you once wrote a story on howard dean that you said had me, "my kind," in mind...the truth of the matter is you have no clue what me or my kind are like...where you end we dont even begin...though right now i am just thinking of how to get my next rent paid after spending so much on my vacation to see my beloved—unpaid vacation days because i was saving the paid ones for later, not knowing that i would come back to the ugliest job parting i've ever experienced—eventually i will get to a better place again...and i will tell the story of the little pseudo-progressive paper in connecticut that hired me to do meaningful work, then decided that filling what few of its pages that were actually writing with dining reviews and basketball news and incoherent graphs and layout a 12-year-old with photoshop lite could top were greater budget priorities...

here's the truth: if any real progressive paper came to the wannabe town of new haven, for as long as it lasted, the advocate would be shown to be what it is: old, marginal, comfortable, about as dangerous as a toothless old man...the place where your "kind" turn to feel part of things still...

if ever you were something to behold, as a man, a writer, an editor, and i believe at one time you were, i felt hints of it even in the time i knew you, you are now lips tight sucked around the corporate member...

i do not forgive you at this time, and i want you to know you have put my life in immediate peril...every time you look at that unpaid intern think of this...you caused this...it did not have to be this way...it could have been something truly good, and if you had let me in just a little bit you would have seen what an incredible allie i would have been to the paper and to your inherent dignity...

but you put me into yesterday's slop bucket and tossed...i now have to live with this violence, and you do too.

[Southpaw Bookworm]

1. One hell of a rant

And from one editor to another: :hug: May you find employment soon!

[afraid_of_the_dark]

2. Welcome to DU!

:hi:

[Westegg]

3. Quite a missive. Uh, I assume this wasn't a copy-editing gig...?

[markses]

4. Expect a visit from the police

I would certainly call the police if I received that from a former employee.

[NewHampster]

6. my thoughts exactly

[jburton]

5. nice rant!

I lived in New Haven in 2000, and remember how unremarkable the NH Advocate was. After years of reading the Dallas Observer and Denver Westword, the Advocate was incredibly boring. Mostly a mag to find out what bands are playing where.