It's not about journalism, or integrity, or your personal artistic vision. You accepted a job. It doesn't matter what the "understanding" was at the outset. Whoever is writing the numbers on your check has the final say.
Sometimes in the glorious battle of "writing" -- which gets even more heroic when you fancy you are practicing journalism with a capital J -- we forget that. Sometimes even when you're working on what you think is an actual newspaper, you're still the pen for hire and someone else is calling the shots. I can't get too high and mighty about this because I once confused a weekly community newspaper with journalism when it was really about selling ads, making money for the owners, and not getting the readers so worked up, they called or, even worse, called the publisher.
Since then, I've been traveling in the totally different world of public relations writing where the client's version of any story is the truth, even if it's not. It is! And it is your mission to spread that truth, even if you don't believe it. You do! And that is your job. It's always an option not to accept the job, but if you do, then suck it up.
Posts
3 comments:
What if the assignment in question in being funded with public money? Do you get to play with the truth then too?
It's a souvenir coffee table book, probably to give to donors or sell in the giftshop. It isn't the Pentagon Papers.
I think you missed the point of what Roy wrote. If they had told him from the beginning that they wanted to tell only parts of the story, and that they didn't want a journalistic retelling of fact, then he would have declined the project. Then they could have gotten the writer who would be the best fit for the job. However, he wrote a proposal and they placed no restrictions on what he was going to do. He offered them a chapter of the book while it was in progress, and they didn't bother to read it and let him know that he was off track for what they wanted. It's unconscionable to wait until an entire book is through to make the assignment clear, especially when the commissioned author gave opportunities for communication along the way. They wasted his time, and their own time and money.
Yeah, Roy is incensed that they don't want to do journalism. But mostly he's pissed off that they wasted his time. And unlike just about everybody in the PR world, he has no reason to suck it up and deal with the client's revisionist history or last-minute demands. Roy is a theater critic institution in this town, as evidenced by the fact that he has worked steadily since retiring from the T-D. His reputation is more than established, and at this point he can afford to keep his integrity. If it were otherwise, then he never would have told the story of the terminated project in Style Weekly.
Post a Comment