Professionalism? What’s that?

One of the hardest parts about deciding whether I want to dive head-first into the world of journalism in the spring once I graduate is dealing with peer editors.

And I don’t mean my friends and classmates going over my work, I mean the newspaper masthead that is responsible for what makes it, and what doesn’t make it, in the newspaper each week.

Some have been great. Really great. Even if they didn’t agree with me, or if they wanted to take my story in a different direction, they made me feel like we were on the same level and we’re working together to create the best possible story.

We collaborate, they provide direction, I ask questions and bounce ideas off them. Very similar to what our professors have done over the past four years. They coach us through our stories to make them better without pissing us off.

But then there are others who, when they’re done talking to me, I want to scream at them and punch them in the face. It’s not what they say or what they ask me to do. Other editors have said and asked me to do similar things. It’s their job.

Take the story in a slightly different direction? Sure.

Ask my sources a few extra questions? No problem.

Dig up a couple of statistics to make the story a bit more substantial? Sounds great!

Write the lede this way instead of that way? I never thought of that, thanks!

It’s how they say it.

When I’m working with an editor, I don’t want to be talked down to, treated like a lesser journalist or dismissed like my thoughts about a story don’t matter. That’s not coaching, it’s called being a jerk with a superiority complex.

Normally I would consider that I’m being too sensitive or whiny or something, but many of my colleagues have had the same problems with the same editors for most of our careers.

I think – I’m not sure, but I think – these editors act this way because they see themselves as more gung-ho than the rest of us, and they believe they have amassed more, or at least better, experience than the rest of us.

Both of these things could be true, but it doesn’t give these people the right to treat us like we’re incapable morons who couldn’t write a good piece of journalism after 10 years of journalism school, never mind four.

I really hope my future editors in “the real world” don’t act so condescending and unnecessarily superior. Of course there will always be that workplace superior-subordinate relationship, and bosses outside of journalism screw that up all the time by being jerks. But the working journalists who have been my instructors for the past four years have worked really hard to paint a collaborative, equal picture of the modern journalist-editor relationship.

I just hope I haven’t been spoiled.

And I really hope I can be fair and professional next semester when I’m in the editor’s chair. I was a handling editor on three McClung’s stories this semester and I think I was collaborative and helpful, but only because I tried really hard to be. I hope that if I ever talk down to someone or treat them like crap, whether it’s on purpose or by accident, that person has the guts to tell me.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the guts to tell these editors.