I don't talk much about my job here. Hm.
I've got about a month remaining before I hit the magical 200 hour number in my internship. My two months (has it really been that long already??) there have been pretty fun. The work environment is pretty laid back, and I like the people there a lot -- where else could I talk fantasy baseball with my boss and play 8-ball with my co-workers during down time?
The work itself is not bad. Although I design pages occasionally, I mainly edit stories for all the fun stuff -- grammatical and spelling errors, style errors, and so on. Sometimes I even write headlines. (I feel like a dork for being proud to see one of my headlines make it into the paper unchanged, but it is cool to see, even if nobody outside the office knows who the hell writes them.)
In general, our writers are competent, so we mainly edit to shorten things up if we need to save space. However, it is not editing the work of our writers that annoys the copy editors. Nope -- it's editing the columnists' submissions that drives us up the wall.
It takes a certain sort of person to write a column -- a person with a strong personality who can come with any random topic and go on about it. Unfortunately, this breed of person is also touchy about editing, which means we can get an earful of bullcrap if we "unjustly" edit their precious columns. That's always fun to deal with.
Not all the columnists are bad. There is this one guy, Peter Buffa, whose columns I like reading because he writes about interesting things, and because his writing style is quite bizarre. He also actually knows how to write, which is nice. The main problem with him is separating paragraphs into more readable chunks.
But for every Buffa, there is a B.W. Cook, whose columns are stuffy, boring, pretentious and make me want to vomit. It's like the same high society column every week with the same random, rich socialites. To make matters worse, his columns are riddled with random errors, and he always has these enormous, unwieldy paragraphs that are like some 10-year-old's first message board post. I hate this asshole.
There is also a legal column written by Judge James P. Gray that my co-workers despise, and also does not seem to be on the Web site. It is usually horribly boring, blandly written and more ginormous than a boss from Shadow of the Colossus. Still, he makes way fewer errors than Douchebag Cook up there, so he is only second-in-command of the Asshole Brigade for me.
Something that is kind of interesting about the three newspapers we put out (the Daily Pilot, the Huntington Beach Independent and the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot) is they have an assload of religious content, which isn't too surprising since the Orange County area is infamously conservative. I'm actually not even opposed to the religious columns; the contributors are generally level-headed, seemingly nice people, and we do get semi-regular contributions from a member of the local humanist association (although, ironically, he comes off as much more insane than the religious folk, since he's always spouting random conspiracy theories; what a lunatic).
So, um, that's about as much as I feel like writing about the ol' job, since this could quickly shift into tl;dr territory. *bounces off to watch more Utena*
