Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom called Sunday evening, wanting to take out an ad for her “Hair on Fire” radio show on KFNX 1100-AM in Phoenix. She sent me the graphic, and when I saw it my thought was: Great. A two-column square.
Because I don’t have a two-column space anywhere on the sidebars, nor do I have the necessary code skills to customize the template and create such a space.
Failure. Again.
It was probably either Vince Lombardi or George S. Patton who said, “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you . . . a loser.”
Being an intensively competitive personality is a sine qua non of success in the news business, which is why every newsroom is a seething cauldron of thwarted ambition. Nobody goes into journalism aspiring to be the guy who proofreads obituaries, but somebody has to do that job, and if you don’t strive constantly to win, win, win in the news business, you’re gonna lose, lose, lose until one day you find yourself proofing obits.
Failure cannot be rationalized or excused or tolerated. If you are assigned a story and fail to get the story — if you miss the deadline — the time you spent pursuing that story cannot be retrieved. Your salary that day was just wasted money for the publisher. It therefore behooves you to avoid failure, to view every assignment as a do-or-die mission: Get the story, and get it in time, or get the hell out of the business.
Lately, the do-or-die has been more about dying than doing, and the question that has haunted me in recent weeks is this: Am I suffering from depression — a mood disorder — or is my sense of utter failure an objective assessment of reality? Continue reading Dying on Deadline: Fear, Loathing and a Frank Confession of Professional Failure →
