SunDevil
10-09-2007, 02:39 PM
http://thebiglead.com/?p=3359
It's a really good article. Here is just an excerpt of something that all of us can use.
Let me give you an example. When I left the Charlotte Observer in 1992 to take a job at the Ann Arbor News, Rich Oppel, the editor at the Charlotte Observer at the time, made it a point to hunt me down in the main newsroom to tell me that I wouldn’t make it in this business and that I’d return to the Observer and beg for my old job. Now I have no idea if Rich Oppel is or was a bigot. I just figured he was petty and stupid. I was making about $430 a week at the Observer at the time and I was covering high school and little league sports out of bureau in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Ann Arbor News was going to pay me like $650 a week to cover The Fab Five. What was I supposed to do? I had worked in Rock Hill for 15 months, had written three or four stories for A1 of the Charlotte Observer that had nothing to do with my beat, my direct supervisor had put it in my evaluation that I worked too many hours and needed to slow down and get a life. During those 15 months, I’d never heard from Rich Oppel. He hadn’t hurt or helped me at the Charlotte Observer. And he damn sure wasn’t going to hurt or help me at the Ann Arbor News. He wasn’t in control of my destiny. I was. I’ve run across a lot of Rich Oppels in this business, small, petty people who want to put a glass ceiling on people they don’t like and prop up the people they favor. They can be worked around and ignored. You can’t control what people think about you. You can control the quality of your work and create opportunities for yourself if you don’t weigh yourself down with someone else’s perception of you. I’m perfectly content to let people controlled by their bigotry or pettiness to miss out on taking full advantage of my talents. This is America, if you acquire a skill, some businessman - black, white, brown or yellow - is going to find you and exploit it.
It's a really good article. Here is just an excerpt of something that all of us can use.
Let me give you an example. When I left the Charlotte Observer in 1992 to take a job at the Ann Arbor News, Rich Oppel, the editor at the Charlotte Observer at the time, made it a point to hunt me down in the main newsroom to tell me that I wouldn’t make it in this business and that I’d return to the Observer and beg for my old job. Now I have no idea if Rich Oppel is or was a bigot. I just figured he was petty and stupid. I was making about $430 a week at the Observer at the time and I was covering high school and little league sports out of bureau in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Ann Arbor News was going to pay me like $650 a week to cover The Fab Five. What was I supposed to do? I had worked in Rock Hill for 15 months, had written three or four stories for A1 of the Charlotte Observer that had nothing to do with my beat, my direct supervisor had put it in my evaluation that I worked too many hours and needed to slow down and get a life. During those 15 months, I’d never heard from Rich Oppel. He hadn’t hurt or helped me at the Charlotte Observer. And he damn sure wasn’t going to hurt or help me at the Ann Arbor News. He wasn’t in control of my destiny. I was. I’ve run across a lot of Rich Oppels in this business, small, petty people who want to put a glass ceiling on people they don’t like and prop up the people they favor. They can be worked around and ignored. You can’t control what people think about you. You can control the quality of your work and create opportunities for yourself if you don’t weigh yourself down with someone else’s perception of you. I’m perfectly content to let people controlled by their bigotry or pettiness to miss out on taking full advantage of my talents. This is America, if you acquire a skill, some businessman - black, white, brown or yellow - is going to find you and exploit it.