A wake in this case refers to the tradition of taking a co-worker out for lunch on his last day on the job, to celebrate his good fortune and wish him well for the future. Joe Sorrentino worked as a photographer for WCN Newspapers for about three years, the last two as chief photographer. He and I got to know each other during the nearly two-and-a-half years that I worked there, so when he called to tell me last weekend that he had been fired, I was as excited as he was.
WCN was not a good place to work. When I was there, a co-worker of mine and I tracked our hours as averaging between fifty and sixty a week, just to complete our basic responsibilities, which included editing the newspapers, writing their editorials, and writing four to six news stories for one of the papers. A typical starting salary for an editor was $24,000; for a reporter, it was less than $20,000. In its Union County office, WCN published seven newspapers, with a good many more published in three other offices in Essex County.
The standards of the company ranged from abysmal to nonexistent. The editor in chief regularly hired new people fresh out of college with no experience, provided no training, and gave them editorial responsibility for two papers. Stories often were so lopsided that they included only one source, and I had a reporter at one point who couldn't even write a sentence. I even caught her plagiarizing stories three times in the same four-week period, and they still wouldn't fire her. After I left, a friend of mine quit when the editor in chief refused to let him run on a valid news story on the grounds that it would have negative repercussions for a school board member in Hillside.
For my first eighteen or twenty months, I swear I did the best job I could. I diligently covered meetings, made phone calls, and dug up good stories. When one of the Board of Education members was charged with beating up a student in another municipality, I wrote a front-page story on it. When the school board made a first-of-its-kind appeal of a defeated schools construction plan, I covered it so thoroughly that the administration started asking me if there had been any new developments. I wrote hard-hitting editorials, pioneered innovations in the layout, and gave other editors and reporters ideas for their papers.
Eventually, I wore out. I had busted my hump digging up stories, managing in the process to raise the ire of several prominent officials in my coverage area, and still I had nothing to show for it. There was no raise, a promotion I had been promised was given to someone else who earned less, and there was no help to be had in reducing the workload.
Worst of all was ownership. WCN Newspapers is one of the few remaining privately owned community newspaper chains, held by four siblings named Daniel, Cyann, Royal and Patrick, whose father, William, started it about thirty years ago. The siblings work about forty hours a week each, rake in hefty salaries and regularly eliminate personnel, close offices or refuse to replace broken equipment when they want a raise or see profits decrease, and treat their employees with inexcusable condescension.
From what I heard today, WCN has rolled several of its newspapers together, so that intsead of having seven Union County papers, it publishes four, each covering more municipalities. Publishing fewer newspapers was the pretext Daniel used for laying off Joe, which of course means that more quality news events are going to go unphotographed and the quality will drop still further. Additionally, the editorial pages of all four newspapers will run in common, which means they've all lost their voice in their communities. The papers are poorer for it, and so are the places they cover.
My prediction based on all this is that when William, the company founder, dies, his children are going to sell the place as soon as they reasonably can. Royal as much as admitted a few years ago at the Iowa Press Association awards banquet that none of them wanted to follow their father into the newspaper business, but they weren't given a choice. It's a shame that their dislike of the business has channeled itself into such disregard for the people who make them their fortune.
At one point, a group of us discussed forming a union and did some investigation to see if it would be worthwhile to take the plunge. To this day, my big regret is that we didn't push ahead. It's an awful place to have worked. I still get angry thinking about it, even though I left the place in October 2004.
I wish I could put this behind me, forgive and forget, but something about that place won't let me let it go. Chirst forgive the hardness of my heart, and let me be more like him.
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