On being a word whore

Obviously losing my job is on my mind, so I'm going to say some more about it. I'm not going to whine about how petty the people involved are or anything like that (although given how minor the offence was, the wild overreaction -- although it is exactly what I would expect, sadly -- has dented my faith in humanity just a little). I thought I might though take the opportunity to talk about being a whore.

Okay, so I don't get to have the sex life of a whore but I do an activity for money without much caring who I do it with. I don't think it's admirable, but it's still honourable. I put the same care and effort into each job, regardless who I do it for, and I think that's a good thing.

I had cause to think about this when the woman who sacked me, Anna Reynolds, was telling me that it was sooooooo terrible that I said bad things about the paper (Ms Reynolds doesn't know me very well, or she may have realised that I exaggerate, I piss and whine, I glory in overegging the pudding, but whatever, she doesn't know me at all, and doesn't care to; I'm just the problem sub who upset a columnist). So she is saying "it's not a good fit". And I'm thinking, what a weird thing to say.

Because it would make sense if I made decisions to do with policy, or to do with what went in the paper, or it actually mattered what I thought about the stuff in the paper. (Or if I expressed the same opinions in the newsroom or to people who work for the paper, so that I depressed morale in some way; but I did no such thing.) But none of that actually does matter. A sub doesn't make decisions except for in matters of English, and English is a medium, entirely agnostic to what is written in it. In the same way, I might scoff at the columnists (and I'm pretty sure that Ms Reynolds, who I credit with some intelligence herself, does not think that some of the blatherers in the Mail are worth reading) but I treat their work with care.

I've worked on some terrible things in my time. I worked for a vanity publisher for a couple of years as a freelance. I have no shame! Some were decent -- just not particularly saleable -- but others were truly terrible. Do I feel bad about being part of exploiting them? Yeah, but I did an honest job for them. Their books remained terrible -- nothing I could do about the lack of plot in a novel or the incoherence of a thesis in nonfiction -- but they became well written.

I worked for a set of shipping magazines that consisted entirely of wall-to-wall advertorials, which made no pretence of being anything else. I edit books now that leave me mystified why they were ever commissioned. But no matter. It's not for me to care why. I don't commission them.

Is this truly hard to understand? A lot of subs enjoy their work -- and I enjoy subbing over copy editing too -- because it is satisfying to them, but do they think the papers they work for are good? Are you kidding? You think subs on the Sun think the Sun is a great newspaper? LOL. You have to remember when you ask that question that most subs are very intelligent. Many have graduated from being journos and are, in general, well read and attentive to language. They are not Sun readers, in other words. (The Courier-Mail is not as bad as the Sun by a long chalk. Although I think the columnists in particular are weak, and the selection of front-of-book stories really lacks, there is a lot of decent content: it's a full-spectrum paper like an English broadsheet, rather than a tabloid. Its problem, for my money, lies in its politics and its desire to knock down rather than build--which isn't uncommon among newspapers. It's reminiscent of the English Daily Mail--and I would put money on it that most of the subs on the Mail would make a bad "fit" in Ms Reynolds' view, because it carries so much stuff that is plainly supposed to pander to its readership, and is wholly transparent to anyone smart enough to sub it.)

Saying that a sub should "fit" a newspaper is a bit like saying a house painter should like your house. But what does it matter if they do, so long as they paint it well? So of course I know Ms Reynolds is smart enough to know this as well as I do, but if she doesn't have an important-sounding reason, she is going to have to tell me the truth: she fired me because a huge drama was caused out of very little and when there's a drama in a corporation, heads must roll, and my head is pretty small in the big scheme of things (and small details like that it's my living, that the punishment doesn't by any means fit the crime, that there were several better ways of handling it, all mean nothing because the opportunity has presented for drama and serious decisions, and anyway, sacking people is a regular job for an executive at News Limited, so what should they care that the person they hurt is actually a human being, who was more or less blamelessly doing a good job, making them look good?). After all, who would seriously get upset that a whore does not much like his john? So long as you fuck me, what does that matter?

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:16 pm