*Part 2 is on hold indefinitely.
See information near end of entry. The complexity, or apparent tedium, of this
story reflects the density and high volume of business at this old newspaper job.
[Edits done 5/31/13. My apologies for confusion caused by errors in some places. A sentence with an important fix is marked between asterisks. Further edits done 6/2/13, to end note. More edits 6/3/13. More edits 6/4/13. Edit 6/26/13. Edit 7/9/13.]
Subsections below, in Part 1:
The NJN office in Butler,
pre-Maria
Maria comes on staff, as a fairly routine “accession”
Some measures of how Maria and I became two linchpins of the operation,
and how this defined our relationship
Other coworkers there among the newer crew, and some practical
realities
Maria came to be a practical editorial anchor with some parity with me;
but parity and mutual respect started to yield to a vertical-power assumption
of hers
Maria’s
smart apprenticeship period, living and letting live
Maria
scampers into a more superior role to me after a hiring mishap
[Information on Part 2, to be
withheld]
Marketing fellows appear on stage
Preface: In my “Signpost” entry of May 3, where I heralded the Maria item with some reference to
papers accumulated in 2001 against the possibility of legal action, I didn’t
realize how portentous this may sound. Was there some possibility of a suit
(years ago—the statutory limits have long since expired)? Need this be part of
the story?
It’s funny—the story could be
better for my telling a fair amount about the legal issues that I formulated as
potentially having with North Jersey Newspapers in 1999-2000, but I hadn’t
really wanted to say much about them.
What makes the “motherlode” of
files I mentioned in the “Signpost” relevant is that it does provide some
important metes and bounds for me to compose this blog entry, but it doesn’t
mean my story is about some legal matter, for the most part. I explain some of
the legal stuff in End note 1.
Editorial note: Below, I use the
word “newswriting” or “newswriter,” which may be a solecism or jargon, to,
among other things, distinguish editorial workers who primarily write news
stories (a challenging enough task, and tending to be an entry-level sort of
task, especially at small newspapers) from editors who are managerial (of
underworkers), or copy editors (who fix errors in, shape, etc., written
pieces), or layout or “line” editors (who fashion how things end up on pages,
including writing articles’ headlines, etc.). These latter jobs are more
technical, but are still important; and one need not have done a lot of
“newswriting” to be able to do them. Part of the young “newswriters’” suspicion
of me at NJN seemed to arise from their really not understanding the more
technical areas of copy editing as your main task in a newspaper milieu, for
which you were qualified by considerable past and current experience.
I had said in an earlier (November 27, 2012) blog entry that a coworker, Maria, at NJN
was worth a look. She is actually, I believe, the newspaper lieutenant who
released Skoder from NJN’s Argus
edition of The Suburban Trends in
late 2000. This whole story may have had its interesting points for you, but the
prospect of it may be getting old by now; but the Maria component is still
worth fleshing out a bit. Some reasons have relevance.
First, there are three imperatives
for anyone seeking a job in the media (especially print): (1) learn to work
well with other people who are different from you in personality (this is something
I’ve had to do, and still have lessons in, but which it seems that, at least as
often as not, others can’t do too well—as common-sense as the imperative may
seem); (2) never think that your doing well in school entitles you (as an
“unalienable right”) to smooth sailing in an unimpeded editorial career
immediately thereafter; and (3) never think that your career should be
indefinitely at any one particular
company, whether it is the “best of its kind” (supposedly) or not. One or more
of these points apply to the Maria story.
Second, the Skoder mess, rearing
its head in my Vernon Township volunteer business in the Environmental
Commission in winter 1998, remained the key (most morally fundamental) reason I
dealt with NJN as I did from spring 1999 until late 2000 (though there were
other components that might have struck some there as more personally related
to Maria). To make a long story short: *My boss NR’s handling of the Skoder
situation in February 1998 (see, e.g., stuff in here) definitely comprised
an important prelude for NR’s motivations for how she handled me vis-Ã -vis
Maria in early 1999.* And, somewhat less dynamically interwoven, NR’s making
Maria the top editor of the Trends
(and Argus) in August 2000 (over a
year after I’d left NJN) still logically involved, for me, how the Argus was presumably a paper “covering,”
in part, Vernon Township, my town, where its main newswriter Skoder had
unprofessionally triggered my abrupt departure from the EC; and now Maria was
in a position to understand what it meant to helm a paper with such a recent
history and as was more generally relevant to my town. This simplifies the
situation a good bit. But if it wasn’t for all this, most of the other business
of my contacting different people at NJN in 1999 and 2000 wouldn’t have
happened.
Third, Maria gives a good
example of how some young women might tend to go overboard a bit in some of
their workplace style, but if you had known them when they were less apt to “go
overboard,” you could understand them from a broader and more supportive
perspective. (What I mean by this will become clear.)
Fourth, in finishing up my
recent Skoder entries, I found a motherlode of old files I had forgotten the
location of. They actually all pertained to—indeed, had been organized for the
purpose of—some potential legal defense if I had trouble issuing from NJN in
2001. Which, it turned out, I did not. (This also relates to the November 27 blog entry mentioned above, under the subhead “Story of a lieutenant may come, but is
decisively held off.”)
This motherlode of
late-2000/early-2001 files is very interesting, but if you are bored by yet
another story of sour dealings from the past, in some sense so am I.
Ironically, I found my copy of a January 11, 2001, letter I sent to a human
resources functionary (“Hermosa,” mentioned in End note 1) at Macromedia, the parent company of NJN (see End note 2), in response to a letter
she sent in late December 2000. I sent it via certified mail, and it is a
substantive, encouraging (to me) letter—one of those “massive shots across the
bow from the battleship New Jersey”
that occasionally I’ve had to employ, often very effectively when I am at an
especially critical, tough legally-related juncture and am scared and
indignant. Along with all else, it included some pungent criticisms of Maria,
which I had remembered in some general sense for a long time, but which when
read anew in the current context, and appreciated anew in their crisp detail,
do give some pause for thought.
But does this mean I couldn’t do
the largely positive entry I wanted to do on Maria?
Well, I can answer that by
answering another question you may have: “Isn’t there some positive personality-related ‘object lesson’ Greg can offer from
all the difficult and mixed experiences he’s had in the ‘dark old days’ of his
media career?”
For now, my answers to each question
are: No, we can still do the positive entry on Maria; and yes, here comes the
more general, positive personality-related “object lesson.”
One key thing to remember is
that Maria eventually became a professor, apparently full-time, leaving news editing
behind. In a way, I think, she was more
suited to being a professor than to being an editor, where tussles with “peer”
personalities (and grubby compromise) are so much more common. Her being a sort
of idealist where she can teach others per her lights, and grade papers with
unimpeded concentration, has made her better suited to being a teacher, I
think, while her rather brittle (or impulsively overreaching) inability to
compromise interpersonally (on occasion) made for some difficult times with her
in the newsroom. We could almost look at the most positive phase of her
being a newsroom person, about October 1997 to about January 1999, and then
skip to how she seems to have flourished as a professor (say, about 2006 [roughly estimating] to
today), except there is a certain important interim phase (1999-2003?) to look
at. (The professor phase since she got her doctorate I’m not terribly familiar
with.)
The NJN office in Butler,
pre-Maria
To make things simple for
myself, I’ll do a good bit of this from memory, and try not to refer to the
sobering old records too much.
Somewhat like All American
Crafts, and like some other “cheesier” publishing places I’ve been at, the
Butler office of NJN had a certain quality of having “eager young workers
shouldering pretty haphazardly managed work,” and some level of occasionally
heavy employee turnover. In terms of specific newspaper titles, the Butler
office produced The Suburban Trends
(this had its own dedicated, family-like staff, with head editor Jack Carle,
who I think was in his fifties) and Wayne
Today and Suburban Life (for
these latter two I worked; they were smaller papers, basically freely
distributed to residents in certain local areas, and headed by my boss NR).
Both WT and SL experienced the
turnover and haphazard conditions, the Trends
not so much; but as with other such employers, you could enter and then “enjoy”
a period (not necessarily due just to you) in which there was a sort of “cozy
enough” stability—of the array of workers (the period lasting maybe a year);
and then all the sudden things could go into hectic transition again.
I came in November 1996 to do
copy editing of press releases for WT
and SL. My work was usually in the
evenings and on weekends. There were two deadlines I had to be mindful of;
Friday was one deadline day, for the issue of WT that came out on Sunday. But that deadline day wasn’t quite so
crucial for me—with me expected to get things done by then—as was the Monday
deadline day, regarding what I did on the weekend. Let me explain.
My role in preparing filler material
for daytime editors. During the week, I would prepare press-release material
that could be used, by the weekday editors, as filler for the issues put
together on deadline. Say, Monday through Wednesday evenings, or the evenings of
whatever selection of days from Monday through Thursday I chose to come in, I
would edit press releases, some amount made available to me in pre-edited form
each day, that when finished would be left in a kind of electronic queue to be
selected from by editors working on the deadline days (Friday and Monday) to
flesh out issues of WT and SL (WT
only on Friday, both WT and SL on Monday). Also, I laid out pages
(more on this below) for use in the papers done on both deadline days (and in
fact, because the pages I laid out almost always had only press releases, the total number of press releases used for this purpose was a lot more
than those used by daytime editors for their own pages).
Now, the only paper done for the
Friday deadline, the Sunday issue of WT, was
usually less substantial than the Wednesday issue; and the Sunday issue’s
deadline efforts the daytime editors seemed more warmed up for (after they’d
had a near-full work week). But the tougher deadline for the day crew was
Monday, partly because there were all of two papers, the Wednesday issue of WT (which was more substantial than the
Sunday one) and the sole weekly issue of SL.
Plus, when the daytime crew came in on Monday, I think they had a tougher time
getting up to speed for slamming out the work on deadline that day. So, in a
sense, there was more pressure on me
to get my particular things done (edited
press releases and my laid-out pages) by Sunday evening, for use in the Monday
deadline-meeting process.
I also dummied pages—a bigger
area of my responsibility. My work didn’t just involve copy editing stories
on a computer using an old-time (a 1980s-era) editorial software system, but I
also dummied pages: with pencil on paper dummies, I actually delineated where a
story would go on a page (that had areas preempted by ads to go on them). And except
for my very first months there, when the layout people were still located in Butler, the finished dummies were faxed to a production facility
at the office building of one of the corporate umbrella company’s newspapers,
the Herald-News, which was in Clifton and Passaic;
this became where our page layout was largely done. (We could also do tweaks to already-laid-out pages on Quark in the Butler office.)
I also had (in my evening hours)
to “size” certain press release stories I’d copy edited to fit where I chose to
put them (so that, for example, if there were only about seven column inches of
space, I had to have the story be close to this length—there was a way, I
think, that the old computer system indicated the resulting size to you). Thus,
you could try to edit so if there was overflow of the story, it could fairly
easily be cut by whatever editor might finish up the pages at deadline time
during a workday. Eventually, when NJN installed a new suite of computer platforms
that included a Quark platform for designing pages on the computer, I could copy-fit
the stories (again, press releases) on this system myself (I had already worked
with PageMaker and Quark at other employers in the 1990s).
It may seem as if I had some
level of solid responsibility—I chose
stories to go on a page, and I would cut stories to fit: well, yes, I did have
that, and I was capable of meeting it. There were a couple ironies associated
with this: first, the sheer statistics
on my contribution to the amount of editorial matter in the papers suggest that
I was rather key: one fourth to one third of each issue was material I’d edited,
including pages I’d dummied for. And over my two and a half years there, I
edited over 6,000 press releases, worked on 200++ issues of papers, and worked
on 1,450 pages. (By the way, WT’s
circulation was about 43,000.)
Further, I handled this work without
too much strain; I met the need with more ability and aplomb than seemed
typical of some of the younger day-timers, who could be bent out of shape, due
to youth, in meeting deadlines their own way. (Maria, in particular, would have
some respect for me, as if I pulled off a rather inscrutable stunt with my
work—I’ll look at this further later. She actually had the curiosity and
judgment to know in some general way the importance of what I did while seeing
it as rather remarkable that I did it as I did. This at least from what NR told
me, before things soured between NR and Maria on one side and myself on the other,
starting about February 1999.)
Second irony: There was a sort of occasionally conveyed skepticism
(on the parts of younger coworkers) about my work; I think a lot
of it came from the notion that, as someone might theoretically counter me, the
edited material I handled was only press releases sent in by outsiders, and merely
edited by me for style, etc. But as I said, the press-release pages I did made
up a hefty percentage of each of the papers (WT and SL) that I worked
on, and my efficiency was also reflected in my accounting for significantly
less time and less money than the one fourth or one third that my material made
up for the paper. (An aside: This
area of editorial efficiency is very much the opposite of what has been valued
in freelance editors at medical-advertising firms such as I’ve worked at, while
the “free-floating” skepticism you could be subjected to by young coworkers is
roughly the same, though this is for different reasons related to the
professional setup.)
Volume of material for WT and SL was a large component of my job to square with. And, since I was
also working for other, nationally distributing publishers at the time (Country Inns magazine; The World Almanac; Prentice Hall; and others;
and not all of these were at the same time), my mental juices were kept flowing
to keep up my always-on-point competence for this work. That is one good way to
do a lot of adept editorial work—to be so busy at multiple employers that
(issues of stress aside) you’re always kept sharp for your work and busy
time-wise. The main drawback is that, even with this, your aggregate pay for a
year isn’t terribly high. But this situation, from late 1996 through mid-1999,
was key to getting my freelance career—which was at its height from 1997
through 2007—really going as a more or less “always-getting-work” concern.
There were a number of young
people and older editors on the WT / SL staff through much of 1997. There was
a young man (Charles Timm, I think his surname was) who was a sort of “line”/managing
editor; there was Carol N., middle-aged, head editor of SL; there were Liz M. and Nina M., two young women who were
newswriters and only did minor copy editing/page
fitting (at least, Liz did the community calendar pages, which eventually I
inherited from her). Nina eventually became a sort of managing editor for WT, after Charles had left. There was
also Lisa A., who had not yet graduated from college, who was a sort of
editorial assistant, feeding press releases into a scanner.
There was also Nick G., the full-time
sports editor/writer, who was there some while before I ever showed up and
would be employed there the entire time I was there. His department—equaling
almost him alone, though he had freelancers helping during at least football
season—seemed to mean he had the most stable role there, if he was willing to
keep on with it. This whole constellation by and large—with NR over us all, in
her separate office, while the rest were in an open newsroom-type setup—comprised
the WT / SL crew from late 1996 through about October 1997.
Starting about March 1997, Maria
was sending in stories as a freelance news reporter—a stringer—and would for
some time (which I think is how the other newswriters, like Liz, started). Maria
never came into the office, as far as I remember, but faxed things in
(occasionally something was mailed, I think). As I didn’t fully know at the
time, Maria was also completing, or had (by spring 1997) just completed, her
master’s in communications at a state-level college. I just knew her name as
one of the stringers whose byline turned up in WT on a recently regular basis (by mid-1997).
Maria comes on staff, as a fairly routine “accession”
In what order the “stable” crew
started leaving, I forget. Charles left relatively early. Liz left in about
August 1997. I forget when Nina left; possibly at the start of 1998. It was as
a replacement for Liz that Maria was brought in as a staffer in September 1997.
This happened unremarkably logically; Maria was probably viewed by NR as the
most promising of the regular stringers WT
had working for it. Maria had been writing news primarily for WT (and maybe sometimes for SL).
It’s strange, but I was a little
confused on the time Carol N. left. I thought it was in about September 1997.
But no, it was in about October 1998—it was a seismic change of sorts when
Carol N., the head editor of SL,
left. Carol was the only worker at WT /
SL, other than NR or myself, who was not in her twenties. Partly due to her
maturity, she was a steady force carrying SL
on her back, and I think she played some minor role in WT doings, too.
Then, Maria would be put into
her role at SL, but I think this was
done somewhat gradually. It was probably fully underway by November 1998. At
this point, Maria had been in her Liz-replacement role about a year; not only
did Maria do newswriting, but she also had a limited managerial role (perhaps
moving into it after some initial trial time), starting by about March 1998.
This earlier change probably happened as a result of Nina’s leaving. Thus,
Maria had the break of “managerial experience” at WT—after she was there only five
months— because of the high turnover of that place, not only because of her
capabilities.
Maria was a good solid worker,
from what I witnessed, from September 1997 through about October 1998, though I
didn’t usually overlap with her in the office, practically or in-person, much.
That is, I rarely was there in person when she was, and my work for a long time
didn’t require much of her input—or any cooperation on something—and vice versa
for her. But in fall 1998, Maria was made functionally in charge of the SL paper (which was a smaller paper,
even less prestigious-seeming, than WT).
This doesn’t mean I was “passed
over”; actually, in October 1998, NR offered me Carol’s job as head editor of SL, and I declined (as I am reminded of
in reviewing my January 2001 letter). But once Maria was put in this position, there
would then be an effort by NR (maybe with some input from Maria), starting in
November 1998, to hire an assistant for Maria, to work on the SL paper, including in the press-release
handling role I had had for SL (as I
did for WT). This search for an
assistant heralded some odd developments between me and Maria.
Some measures of how Maria and I became two linchpins of the operation,
and how this defined our relationship
[Editorial note: I’m struck by the
amount of density in this account, not only the hectic nature of things, but
how precise dates, amounts of time, and so on both take a lot of work to get
straight and are very relevant to the
story. I’m struck by how much “newspaper” product was trucked off our backs
in a short time; I think all workers involved would have agreed to this in some
terms or other. This story gives a good example of the high volume of such
editorial places, which can stimulate either workers’ errors (or quick
disillusionment with their jobs) or, if they are competent, their being very
self-defensive in how they do their jobs. This is useful to understand how
jealous Maria became, so to speak, in her handling of her power, to the point
of her going out of bounds with me. With my being a copy editor, attuned to
details, obviously part of my strategy became to keep track of the office
history in close detail.]
To sum a few aspects: Things had
been pretty level for me there from November 1996 through about October 1998,
almost two years. In terms of Maria’s and my “tenures” overlapping, things were
most stable (between us) for about 10-12 months of this period—from about September
1997 through October 1998 or so. Was there a point after which Maria started to
“mind my business” more, as retrospectively would be seen to herald a downturn
in her general relations with me, before the November 1998 search for her
assistant started? It’s true she had been given Nina’s supervisory role in
about March 1998, but I don’t think she really tried to meddle in my work in
any sense before late 1998, or
definitely before about February 1999.
Thus, in the “blessed
interregnum” between (1) the first crew I was amid through September 1997 and (2) the
period starting about when Carol left in October 1998, Maria and I were steady
workers there, and she impressed me most positively in that period, though (again)
I had few direct dealings with her (more of my exposure to her came in notes
she made, while there was occasional
direct talk).
As I found probably in later
1998, Maria also had multiple jobs, meaning she had something outside the NJN
nexus. I would find during that staff-fluid year of 1998 that she was teaching
at William Paterson University
as an adjunct professor (which she apparently could do with a master’s degree).
Sometimes a student of hers would fax her a paper via the WT / SL fax machine (with
a cover sheet identifying her as “Professor ___ [surname redacted],” which one
or two other coworkers there at that time were mildly amused at).
(In later years I would find
evidence that she had taught at a number of local colleges and universities,
through [I think] the early part of
the decade 2001-10, though she would seem to have settled to working primarily
at two colleges in the area of Passaic and Bergen counties by about the middle
of the past decade.)
A preliminary personal
assessment. With Maria, you became aware that understanding her as a
personality was something of an imperative, especially if by the sheer
logistics and circumstance of work, you got fairly practically interwoven with
her anyway. Generally speaking, Maria’s personal complexity—her being a sort of
joiner/conformist and also having an entrepreneurial/self-expanding side—came
out in how she seemed to maintain a steady accord with me while not only was I
shouldering a lot of work competently at NJN, but by sometime in 1998 I was now
one of the veterans in our NJN
department (showing the kind of turnover there). From another angle, she
probably realized by summer or early fall 1998 that she was one of the few younger veterans in the WT / SL stable. And yet I was one
coworker who was there longer than she was. So, from both the angle of how I
did my work and the angle of how I stayed on, you might say she regarded me as
having a kind of “charisma” or “magic touch” in being in my role “so long.”
(By the way, today, regarding
her professorly life, there are “Rate my professors” remarks about her, posted
online within the past decade, from a host of young students of hers—the sorts
of comments you can often disregard in some instances, or in given comments’ “subparts,”
because of the immature nature of the relevant judgments, though alternating
with these are more credible judgments, artlessly sincere and
valid-enough-seeming. One general feature of the more credible judgments is a
preponderance of assessments of Maria’s personality, out of which some features
seem to stand out—her seeming “nice” in a global sense, and on the other hand
her seeming lacking in one way or another as a lecturer; it seems that following
the textbook [and not so much her lectures] is one key to doing well in her
class. [One commenter grumbled that Maria had an uncompromising trait—“she’s
always right,” the student noted sarcastically.] This seems to accord with the
most salient things I remember about her, a sort of “nice” or sweet tone, with
some problems in directly communicating, though she seemed consistently
competent in her reading and writing abilities. I will definitely return to
this area later [in Part 2, if it was done]. [Added: Perfect example of the "kid wit"/"brat spit" quality of some of these student comments: Someone opines Maria is "fake." I think what this person is reacting to is a stylish and "appealing" (going to an effort) quality of speaking, which in my firm opinion is not aligned to a general personality trait of insincerity. I didn't consider her generally an insincere or coldly manipulative person. Key consideration: You could call her an "evangelist" type of professor, purveying what she believes in, not a research-type or highly analytical type of professor. This quality came across in her many columns she wrote in 1999-2000. This means an important dimension along which to read her as a person, I think.])
More cool statistics on the
matter. To return to more statistical measures, however you want to
piece things out date-wise (and we are talking a period from about 15 years
ago, where I need help remembering things from old records), one thing should
be kept in mind: it became a key contention—when relations between me and Maria
got a little screwy, for reasons including a particularly complex set of
managerial mishandling—that I made about Maria’s interrelating with me, as I
wrote in my January 2001 letter to “Hermosa” (and I know this was solidly based),
that
“…I found that
[Maria] ignored aspects of my work—understanding and working with which might
have improved our work relations—for more
than half of her tenure there [I think this meant about April 1998 through
June 1999], while this occurred for less
than half of my tenure there. This suggests either that most of the fault
for this lay with her, or that a large change in procedures and atmosphere
occurred there to promote this, or both. I believe it’s both.” [typographical emphasis
is changed somewhat from original]
Apparent reaction to high
turnover as a measure of coworker “loyalty.” Another way to put Maria’s
tenure into perspective, to help explain and maybe excuse her defensive
attitude by 1999, comes from my January 2001 letter. During the entire time I
worked at NJN, I worked, within the WT /
SL group, with 15 people. I was the 16th. Nine of these (60 percent), including me, left in my
time there (to June 1999). Of these, two or three (or more) moved on to new jobs,
and another two or three (or more) were fired. Five left without having a new full-time job lined up (including
myself, though I had freelance stuff going on). Though I’d seen my share of a
fair number of people leaving before Maria was hired, most of this turnover
happened while Maria was there.
Not to say she was responsible
in some way for a lot, or any, of this turnover, including people leaving
without full-time jobs lined up, but it makes sense—without my having talked to
her about this—that if she witnessed this going on, it would have inspired her
to be more defensive about herself as a worker, if not downright selfish. This sort of point might particularly be
considered, whether by her or anyone else interested, if one were to assess how
now, as a professor, Maria might have tenure, which would conveniently
facilitate her forgetting how chancy and tough the editorial world can be.
(Definitely one of the things I keep rather hotly in mind when people
assess the nature of the publishing world, especially when these people are in
the cozy confines of academia, is that academic professionals, aside from any
questions about their specific competence, often get tenure, and at least
they’re not subject to the crazy politics you can get at editorial offices. There
is absolutely no such thing as tenure in the change- and cheapness-plagued
publishing world, though what does seem to work for some long-term people in
this milieu is a rather disreputable [in my view] selfishness on their part,
along with their overestimation of their technical editorial capacities in some
ways.)
Other coworkers there among the newer crew, and some practical
realities
Let’s look, less defensively, at
some of the other new workers in the WT /
SL milieu. I forget exactly when, but as the older crew of 1996-97 gave way
to the new crew getting established by mid-1998 or so, there was a Christa G.
who was hired to be a new newswriter for WT.
There was a Clementina P. hired to write for WT, an interesting young woman who worked there maybe about 11
months—she was suddenly fired for I don’t know what reason (I would encounter
her working at Morris County’s Daily
Record in mid-1999).
Clementina had immigrated from
Romania, and was very good at speaking and writing English (though she was a
little naïve, from an American perspective; she referred to Nicolai Ceausescu,
the reviled communist dictator of Romania who was executed, along with his
wife, in about late 1989, as the “president” who was “killed,” as if in 1998
she was something of a wondering young girl recounting a rather untoward event
involving a somewhat-innocent man—she had probably been about 12 when it
happened). Clementina would eventually become a teacher, of English I think (and
this was in another state, from I found online).
Eventually, by early 1999, there
would be additional newswriters, Tom B. and Sean D., but this is getting ahead
of my story.
For about a year, fall 1997
through fall 1998, Maria was a good, busy newswriter, with maybe a few
editorial (non-writing) tasks on the side (typically all editorial-department people
there wore more than one functional hat). She and I used the same desk; in
fact, her desk had been Liz’s. From November 1996 to about August 1997, when
Liz was gone by about 5 p.m., I could use her desk for my evening work—this arrangement
went fine. The same arrangement happened with Maria. (As with Maria, I had only
crossed paths with Liz a few times.)
Now we’re talking about “the old
days,” the late 1990s, pre-Internet, when a lot of editorial stuff in the
business of a freelancer could be done when you, the freelancer, were
physically on the fly, with you driving to and from offices, either working
there or picking up work. (This method, with work done both at home and at the
office, was what I used with The World
Almanac for periods from 1998 through 2001, and for Prentice Hall later in
2001 and 2002.) I could come in to the WT
/ SL office in the late afternoon; Maria was finishing up. I went to the
snack room or such, to kill time, and wait for her to leave. Maria might leave
to cover a municipal meeting in her newswriting role that night. (As I recall,
she basically stopped doing this go-to-meetings reporting when she was made
head SL editor in late 1998.)
Maria came to be a practical editorial anchor with some parity with me;
but parity and mutual respect started to yield to a vertical-power assumption
of hers
Maria’s
smart apprenticeship period, living and letting live
Maria was always cordial when we
crossed paths. Throughout much of our time on those papers, she seemed to give
me a respectful berth as not to meddle with what I was doing, down to taking
over her desk space when she was ready to leave for the day. And in general, as
I said earlier, after she’d been there about a year, she seemed to regard me
with some admiring sense of wonder—I don’t mean this egotistically, but NR commented
to me that Maria was always surprised at how error-free my pages I’d dummied
and edited for were. To me, this was no mystery—I was always so busy with my
work elsewhere as well as at NJN that I “kept on point” to get the work done
well within a tight timeframe.
In an important sense, for most
of our tenures, Maria and I respected each other’s ways at the place, as I
think we each knew the other was more than competent enough for her and my
roles, and in a sense, we knew intuitively that taking a hands-off approach
with each other was a good policy. (This partly reflected how work for us
various functionaries was shouldered in a sort of pell-mell way, anyway,
whoever was doing it.) And whenever I saw the debris from busy days there when
I was in (the place quiet, in the evening), I knew that whatever crazy stuff
had happened during the day, in what marks were hers, Maria was always showing
her intelligence. Scribbles and notes and such from her direction always seemed
to be done with aplomb. Even when, by early 1999, her ego would start to rise
like a “disconcerting moon in the seventh house” late in my time there, her
intelligence and hardworking quality, even among work flaws, steadily showed.
On a personal level—and here I
redact some things as I tend to with anyone—she was interesting in a certain
way. She seemed not to have the best of luck with men (in dating), but she was
content enough to be busy as heck with her various career irons in the fire,
and with the way the WT / SL scene always kept her running. She
dressed well, and heavily wore makeup (but not in a tartish fashion). If you
wonder why I get “so personal” with such details, well, first, I’m leaving
stuff out that might seem indiscreet to relate, but also, in general, you can’t
help but pick up on the personal sides of young female coworkers, because they
help you flesh out a picture of them which you will definitely need (if you want
to mitigate problems) when things can be rockier with them, sometimes as a
function of their immaturity (or simple inexperience in a turbulent kind of
industry). And in this particular case, if one were to raise the question of
whether Maria was someone who “had problems with men,” to whatever level, this
certainly would be a fair question regarding what started to arise in the
office by early 1999. [Clarification: This need not be considered a sort of invasion of privacy; Maria's feeling uncomfortable with males while in a supervisory role regarding which she was a novice was key to consider inasmuch as two other, newer males who were in the WT / SL department as newswriters posed her challenges, especially as one of them was oddly temperamental. And tied closely to this, her gravitating in spring 1999 to referring a lot of small interpersonal issues to our boss NR became such a preferred method of hers, conjoined with NR's irascible ways of dealing with these regarding me (even while I was a reliable party there), that Maria's more general, personal ways of responding to "male behavior" became an important aspect of addressing NR's more objectionable actions in my complaint process later, where I did allude to the legal concept of discrimination (regarding NR, not Maria). That is, the office became an environment where in some sense females' prerogatives were favored indiscriminately over males', and the question became how to get outside-department redress for this.]
Maria
scampers into a more superior role to me after a hiring mishap
Things, as I suggested, started
to get queered when an attempt was made to get her an assistant for the SL paper in November 1998. At the same
time, there were changes coming down from corporate management to NR, such as
new demands on how to handle timecards and such; all this seemed to send a
shudder of anxiety through things a bit, not least for NR, into early 1999.
When it came to dealing with a
difficult issue at hand, Maria would turn out to be a lot different from “Lori”
at All American Crafts (see this entry). Lori, in 1991, could be rather surprisingly adult in terms of discussing
rather creative things regarding publication content or working out an
especially sticky issue between us (something that could happen in large part
because “Cam,” our boss, defaulted to not having a
wise managerial hand with us).
But in late 1998, when Maria and
I were dealing with problems posed by her new assistant, Janis, through
sometime into January 1999, Maria seemed to work on the details not too badly
with me, at least at times. But Maria also was too heavy-handed with Janis.
Then, after Janis had abruptly resigned, a weird, subtle, but still significant
turn happened, which I will detail later [in Part 2, to be kept on hold], in which, after about early February
1999, Maria would not end up maintaining
a certain “parity” with me. Significantly, she would end up, by spring 1999,
being very much a lieutenant of NR’s, and from this perspective she would opt
to exercise increasing “shows of higher-level position” with me, some of which
were not practically necessary (or could be a little insulting). Generally
speaking, as shown in this, Maria very much valued vertical power relations, not horizontal/partnering relations, in
such an organization—while I would say that very many women in media companies
are like this.
How it arose in early 1999 that Maria
changed to taking a more lieutenant role with me, to the detriment of our
relations, will be looked at in the right context.
To be continued, at some indefinite future point. I decided to take a
break with this. Part 2 may end up in my more leisurely blog, “Missives from
the Jersey Mountain Bear.”
Part 2 was envisioned to include:
Maria’s personality as key to understanding; later coworkers might have
liked her less, not having known her apprenticeship stage
Maria as a bookish, in some sense introverted person
Maria’s becoming a professor
Comparing apples and bicycles: comparing Maria and Skoder
The peculiar challenge of dealing (in Nov. 1998-Jan. 1999) with new
coworker Janis, who quit abruptly
Among the most substantive stuff
left for Part 2 are (1) comments on how Maria became a professor, which
happened after I left NJN and about which I have only sketchy information; by
the way, this is a line of work that I think suits her personality better; and
(2) the intriguing, very circumstantial, but in this context fairly pivotal
account of how coworker Janis came and went—and what this reflects of Maria’s
clumsiness as a newsroom editor in early 1999.
I do have at least a partial
draft of the Janis story, but among other things, it may be a bit too
“transiently interpersonal” or “small-bore,” or “from an older technical time,”
for today’s blog readers. On the other hand, it shows a problem we see today—an
untrustworthy new worker who pulls off some stunts and creates misunderstandings
among established workers, some misunderstandings with consequences over some
time, in the interpersonally dicey realm of an editorial office.
The Maria Part 2 story goes into
the “Afterthoughts” bin, which means it’s in reserve and has great potential,
but will be kept on hold indefinitely.
Marketing fellows appear on stage
Sir Teddy Bear and Mr. Kodiak Grizzly are dressed up, in tuxedos and top hats, and with
decorative canes, and are waiting on a stage, as if they’re going to perform
the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number that Dr. Frankenstein and his monster do in
the movie Young Frankenstein (1974). (This
is where Dr. Frankenstein wants to prove his monster has become a “cultured,
sophisticated man about town,” or such.)
“I don’t know,” Kody mutters
with dissatisfaction. “I could have sworn this story was leading to some need
for my input. I was hoping to shine in, to lean
in. It seemed to me there was some negative stuff that needed to be put
into perspective, and I was the bear qualified to do it.”
“Nonsense,” Teddy says, through
teeth arrayed in an attempt at an endearing smile at the audience as they start
their soft-shoe dance routine, instrumental music kicking in. “We have to
accentuate the positive this season,” he whispers intensely to Kody. Then he
sings his part of the song. Then he gestures to Kody, indicating his cue.
“Puttin’ on the Riiiitz!” Kody bellows in a weird yodel, just like
the monster in Young Frankenstein.
Eventually, as they’re dancing
in playful unison off the stage, Kody has a weird, forced smile, as if he’s trying
his best to compromise and be endearing, but you know it doesn’t entirely suit
him well.
##
End note 1.
Here is prefatory info, and when I come to the “darker” part
of my Maria story toward its end (in Part 2), it will be explained a bit more.
In late December 2000, I received a letter of warning from a human resources
staffer at Gremac, the parent company of NJN, which was housed in the Bergen
Record offices in Hackensack, N.J. (The current name of the newspaper, on its masthead, is The Record, but its older name, which I remember it by, and which had been used in legal documents years ago, is the Bergen Record.) I had dealt with some HR staffers there (in the Bergen Record offices) starting in early 1999,
with my sporadic dealings with them getting most into gear around late June
1999 and extending most intensively for weeks, with this intense period ending about September 1999. First, in late December 1998 or
January 1999, I had consulted with someone there about a difficult coworker,
one Janis, who only lasted a few weeks at the Butler office of NJN; and then in June 1999, after
having resigned from my job there (in Butler), I started a complaint process (with HR in Hackensack) about my boss
that I had very mixed feelings about. Early on, in January, I dealt most with
an HR woman named Christina (if this isn’t her name, it serves as a
pseudonym), and starting in about June 1999, and certainly later exclusively, I
was dealt with by what I consider a dull horse of an HR staffer, whom I’ll
pseudonym Hermosa. [Clarification--end see End note 2 on company names: NJN's HR department was in the Bergen Record building in Hackensack in 1999, but whether it later moved to the West Paterson location of NJN, I don't know; I tend to think not. Gremac, or as it later became named, Macromedia, was headquartered, I believe, in the Bergen Record location in 1999, but whether it, or part of it, moved in 2000 to the West Paterson location, I don't know.]
My situation with NJN—or Gremac, the larger company centered
in the Bergen Record building—got protracted, running through late 1999 and
even through 2000, and is hard to explain and a little embarrassing for me now.
Gremac seemed to want to feel my initial issue of June 1999 was a moot point or
had been disposed of by that fall, and I didn’t feel it was. If you consider my
Skoder situation, which I’ve dealt with through several blog entries (e.g.,
though not all of this was directly involved in any discussions I had about
Skoder with my boss NR, here or here or here), you see a solid skeleton to why I felt my issues weren’t adequately dealt
with by Gremac/NJN in those days.
Particularly, consider how in February 1998:
* Skoder had threatened a lawsuit, as if NJN would pursue
it, against the Vernon Township Environmental Commission; and
* how Skoder’s later reporting on this matter led my boss
(in winter 1998) to threaten my job at NJN’s Butler office in no uncertain terms (see within the complex document here); and
* how even further Skoder was eventually released from
working for NJN’s paper the Argus in
late 2000 (though whether my “case” had much directly to do with this is hard
to say). Other developments in winter 1998-99, spurred by the new hire Janis
whom I mentioned above, I considered compounded with the 1998 Skoder stuff, and
the net result of these aggregated messes led to my complaint in June 1999,
after I had quit my job at the Butler
office.
Anyway, this was all a difficult enough ball of issues—and
mind you, I had other jobs going on through 1999-2001, freelance—which for
practical reasons tended to mute my emotions in this NJN mess a bit.
HR (I would have assumed) was supposed to be the “court of
resort” for me in June 1999, but it turned out frustrating before too long.
After dealing with two staffers there, Christina and Hermosa, I eventually
spoke, in I believe September 1999, with Jennifer Borg, a member of the family
that owns the Bergen Record and who
was also its corporate counsel.
By 2000, Hermosa, of the HR department (and with Christina
out of the picture), had become a sort of “hatchet person” to send me notices
to tell me to back off, or such.
I should note that in such publishing situations as these,
particularly when a company is being high-handed with you and happens
practically to be beyond the reach of normal laws or what local attorneys would
be willing to handle, human resources
departments are basically never much help. Many years ago, in the
mid-1990s, when I went to educational meetings of Manhattan’s
Editorial Freelancers Association, one member/teacher said that when you sought
freelance work (and she was talking about Manhattan
companies), you should never go through HR—they are “the home of the asshole.”
I would find out my own version of this undesirability of dealing with HR in my
own long, colorful experience, but my
own take would be that, at best, regarding quintessentially
editorial-department problems, they were impotent, or they didn’t get it,
though they might be well-meaning (or at least sound as if they were). I found this at Reed Reference
Publishing in 1995-96, and with NJN in a different way in 1999-2000. I would
also find an arguable version of it years later at (at least) one other media company.
In fact, in dealing with Gremac’s HR people, even in the
period in which I was having interactions with the more sympathetic-to-me
Christina, I found one solid reality that supported my case in a way that still
offers lessons, though it didn’t lead to any resolution for me. After weeks (in
summer 1999) of seeming to have to pull teeth to get HR to act on the complaint
I presented, I finally played onto one of the HR people’s phone voice mail
the nastiest (and most legally significant, involving a false accusation of
financially beyond-bounds behavior) phone message NR had left on my phone within the first half of 1999 (before I quit), of
which I had a total of five or six. The lesson for today: if you have solid
evidence of this type, present it as early as possible. It should get the
people you are dealing with moving. In this case, after weeks of what seemed to be their spinning in circles getting
nothing done, the day after I left my message, no fewer than two HR staffers
shot up from Hackensack to the Butler office to talk with NR.
This was an extravagance for them; someone must have feared a real legal case.
The net result was still weaselly: Hermosa, in a subsequent phone conversation
with me, acknowledged that NR’s “tone” in her phone message (which I’d left her
the recording of) was a problem, as she admitted I may not have liked the
tone—which virtually admitted the overstepping-bounds I was complaining about,
though Hermosa put it in pretty much insultingly downplaying terms. (I still
have a recording of NR's phone messages, by the way.) They were going to
downplay the infractions I complained about as much as they could, even to the
point of sounding ludicrous; but at least if you have incontrovertible
evidence, it gets asses moving into doing some kind of investigation.
The general problem with HR departments at publishing
companies concerns the fact that the relationships and peculiar issues that
form among editorial professionals often involve interpersonal chemistry and
issues of perception, personal equity, and a host of circumstantial things that
it can be hard to have solid evidence on (apart from personal witnessing,
journaling, etc.); and human resources, almost as a rule, has a precious,
circumscribed area of competence in which it deals: income and tax-law stuff
(W-4s, I-9s, etc.); boilerplate company policy on various things; certain silly
things like company parties; and so on. But the difference between (1) the types
of issues that bubble up among editors, which can mean threatened jobs,
violation of rights, and many other personal-threat things, and (2) the “tools”
and attitudes of HR staffers is like this: it’s as if the editors are like the
scientific technicians in control of a nuclear power plant, who have their
hands on the levers of keeping a touchy reaction under control, and the HR
functionaries are like dweebish Star Trek
and Star Wars fans who might turn up
and say, “Hey, we can help! Take us up to Warp speed, Captain! Tell Han Solo
and Chewbacca to get ready to head to Planet Smithereen! Boop boop boop boop!”
The nuclear techs could easily tell the dweebs that they and their
mealy-mouthed “stock in trade” don’t cognize a single stinking thing about what the nuclear technicians have the
responsibility and exercise the pains to keep in control, and they might be
told vehemently, “Vay’ al mismisimo
Diablo!!” (Spanish for not-nice wishes.)
Recently there was some news item about a local attorney who
helped run a seminar titled, apparently, “Keeping Pace with Employment Law,”
hosted by the Morris County [New Jersey] Bar Association. The presentation, as
at least one press-release-type story said, “was in response to recent
crackdowns by the New Jersey Department of Labor on wrongfully classified
employees that have resulted in significant back pay, fines[,] and other
penalties being imposed upon small, mid-size[,] and large companies.” The
attorney spoke on worker classification issues “in reviewing the state and federal
employment laws as they pertain to classification of workers as either
independent contractors or employees.” (Quotes from Advertiser-News North, April 25, 2013, p. 26.)
This may be well and good, and goodness knows (starting in
the 1990s) I’ve dealt with matters involving how employers were trying to
handle you both as an independent contractor and as an employee—technically, in
terms of pay, they could handle you as the first, but in practical matters with
your work they could try to handle you as the second. A lawyer can explicate “a
priori-isms” and “best practices” all he wants, but as I’ve so often found, the
law articulates plenty, or even provides some general kind of advocacy, about certain areas of workplace issues, and not a peep about others, and this is a
type of phenomenon I’ve seen again and again, leaving an employee in the lurch in some most-painful issues.
And as I find, similar to the notion that “Possession is
nine-tenths of the law,” your dealing with a painful legal issue in
your isolation because no professional is helping you properly or at all is 90 percent of your grounds to later
fight, or take some stand, in a stolid way that is like the battleship New Jersey sending a two-ton shell over
some asshole’s bow from its 24-inch guns. As with the Barbara Bauer suit, if
you have dealt with the cold, lonely, brutal first three months of being in
that suit, as I did (March-May 2008), in fearful
isolation, everything else that follows is a relatively confidently delivered appendix of your doing it your way, in line with the only
equity interpretation that could possibly make sense to you.
It’s as if your being trampled in a grotesque
rights-violating situation is like the Soviets being overrun on their western
border by the Nazi invasion of *June 1941*, Nazis hacking and ravishing like
unstoppable lava, the carnage and pillaging reminiscent of Picasso’s painting Guernica (where even the horse is
freaking out big-time), and the only satisfaction can be when the ox of the
Soviet Red Army, after years of brutal fighting, eventually pushes the Nazis
back by main force, and pursues its tough chase all the way into Berlin,
signaling its victory with 35 blasts of its cannons or whatever it was, capped
by someone, for a photo op, jamming a Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag,
symbolically ramming the flagpole up Hitler’s cowardly ass.
The issues of equity in the New Jersey publishing realm are nothing so
much as a “forum” in which you are in a legal no-man’s land, and you are
baptized by the fire of others’ licentiousness or your sheer isolation. Your
eventual taking a stand, to decide an issue, is forged, most validly, in that
cold isolation.
So Hermosa sent me a letter in late December 2000,
suggesting—I didn’t know quite what, would they take legal action? (Of what
kind?) And she even said a similar letter had been sent to me in July 2000,
which I had never received. The earlier (July) one had apparently been in
response to my visiting NJN’s West Paterson building, while at the time I was
looking into rates for possibly running ads in local papers for a class reunion
(which I opted not to do because of cost). For Hermosa to have sent me a letter
of warning at that point was benighted.
Hermosa was a good, so to speak, HR hack. When I had dealt with her in 1999, at one point, when I
talked about my having been subjected to discrimination, she had asked me about
whether I belonged to one of the “protected categories.” This was what I would
call “moron liberalism.” Here, it was implied, you could only have your rights
respected if you belonged to a “protected category.” (Ever since then, I’ve
thought I could have answered, “I’m a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I should be in a protected category, in New Jersey, because that
type is the last of the Mohicans here.”)
I was so thrown by Hermosa’s December 2000 letter that in
January 2001 I fired one back, 11 pages, sent by certified mail. It’s the first
such beefy document of defense I’d ever sent an employer as a sort of massively
prodigious shot across the bow. I should post my copy online, but I won’t (though it certainly would put
some things in perspective). After I’d sent it, I never heard from NJN again,
at least its HR department. The long period of wrangling I had with them
through about a year and a half was over, though there wasn’t the best resolution
for me.
I was fearful enough of possible legal issues with NJN that
I compiled my files, as I said. We will see part of why this was at the end of
the Maria story.
As it happened, enough was going on in my life in 2001 that
the NJN situation withered away, as a live issue for me; I didn’t seek trouble
from them, and I was cowed for a while. But my January 2001 letter that was a
shot across the bow was a turning point: it was as far as I had ever had to go
with an employer with that type of thing until then, and it set an important
precedent for me in the following way: I had to do it in isolation, because I
couldn’t get proper legal help in the NJN matter; but after having been through
that in 2000-01, I was readier to deal with Barbara Bauer in 2008. This follows
what might be called “a fortiori” reasoning: you don’t seek to get mired in worse situations as you go along, but
the more you deal in isolation with increasingly bearish ones, the more you are
willing to deal with similar by yourself if they spring upon you again.
End note 2. The
companies involved had an almost absurd welter of names (I may only be off on a
few details here). NJN (as I nickname it), or North Jersey Newspapers, was the
name of the particular entity that owned/managed a flock (maybe 15) of
local-community newspapers, some heavily advertising-oriented (i.e., with these
latter, when not subscription, they were freely distributed things whose
primary function was to circulate advertising; WT and SL were this way; meanwhile,
the Suburban Trends was actually
subscription, though it served only a local region). “Gremac” had been the
umbrella corporation that owned NJN, the Herald-News
(a wider-region paper based in the cities of Clifton
and Passaic—the
building actually straddled the border between the towns), and the Bergen Record, the largest paper Gremac
owned. By early 1999, there were some corporate changes (one either was
coincident with, or was prior to, the changes I’m describing: NJN split off
some of its local papers, ones that were to the south and west of what became
its primary area, mainly Bergen, Passaic, and Morris counties; the south and
west ones became a set of its own, separated from the Gremac fold). Among
corporate changes, NJN became North Jersey Community Newspapers, and the
corporate-umbrella entity had its name change from Gremac to Macromedia. Also,
at some point maybe a few years later, the Herald-News
became functionally folded into the Bergen
Record and was (almost) an edition of it, but the two papers were still
distributed to their original respective service areas, with their respective
mastheads, as if they were separate papers. Lastly, by 2000, there was a grand
relocation of facilities; numerous papers, including the Herald-News and most of what had been in the Butler
facility, moved into an office complex in West Paterson (the town has a different name now--Woodland Park).
The Trends, intriguingly, stayed in
something of its original location, starting to occupy a building in Kinnelon,
just off Route 23. (It left this Kinnelon location a few years ago.) The Bergen Record
remained in its original location in Hackensack,
as far as I know ([update] but recently has been moving to the West Paterson/Woodland Park location [I don't know when this started], with the aim to sell the old building on River Road, Hackensack, according to a Star-Ledger story of around July 2. This reflects a broader situation of changing times for newspapers, as The Star-Ledger has put up its own building in Newark for sale, according to the same interesting news article, which is too complicated to further represent here).
