Journalist manque. I write (and associate managing edit!) for the Sun, the American tabloid that got the anthrax a couple years ago. I generally do cover stories about predictions and prophecies (almost always end-of-the-world, almost always made up), although I also get a few newsletters about genuine paranormal events which are also covered by the paper. The End Times stuff is wearing me into a smooth, shiny nub of bone, slowly but surely. Still, I can't get over the cachet the position gives me in the freak community, and the access to the net with the explicit purpose of exploring the strange and wonderful -- it's a dream job. It's also driving me quite insane (arguably, it's merely steering my pre-existent insanity in new and exciting directions, but you get the idea).
I had to write about Ronald Reagan today -- three tabloid pages (with large photos, admittedly) of his prophecies and predictions, only some of which were made up. Well, OK, most of them, but the stuff about Armageddon actually came from a People Magazine interview quoted on rotten.com.
Meanwhile, our sluggish circulation will no doubt be driven further down by the company's latest product, a "special" on Ronald Reagan. These are one-shot glossy magazines, generally commemorating famous dead people or events (although we did an "American dream" type one on Arnold Schwarzenegger during his run for governor -- he's now honorary editor of several of our titles). They're basically photo books with minimal text full of catchy & pertinent facts, and the distributors tend to put them in our racks, driving our sales down and making the general atmosphere here gloomy because bad circulation=CEO yelling at editor=editor having to make a show of making us work harder (without bringing up problems with distribution, since editors can't control that)=strange hours, stranger layout decisions, and last minute rewrites that pretty much everyone knows have very little effect on actual sales. This new special, the Reagan one, will be on the stands for an unprecedented four months (probably to take advantage of the run-up to the election), which has us all anxious about our ongoing existence. So, it's a sick company. But a rather good job within it. |
