I just want to throw in my 2 cents worth here as an ex-TT employee. First of all, I left on my accord, so this isn’t sour grapes, but you’ll see later why I chose to leave and why so many others have done so.
Let me just give you one example of how messed up things are at the TT. On Dec. 1 Taiwan had elections for the legislature. It was a big news night. Our 11:30 deadline was pushed back by one hour to 12:30am. But we missed that deadline by nearly two hours. This as a result delayed the production of the Liberty Times, and that in turn meant the Liberty Times hit the newsstands late after the competition. On a big news day, no less!! Naturally, the owner of the Liberty Times was upset and wanted to know why the TT was two hours late.
So what was the reason? For starters, the news editor, who wrote a page one story on the election results, didn’t turn her copy in until 12:30, which was the deadline for the whole entire paper! If you’re not familiar with news production, it takes at least an hour after the final story is turned before the copy editors and layout editors can finish their jobs. So that front page news report should have been in by 11:30 at the latest, but it didn’t come in until 12:30am.
Because the news editor was tardy, other reporters took that as sign that they could file their stories late, too. As a result, the last story wasn’t filed until 1:30am and the paper didn’t get done until much later.
So why didn’t anyone tell the news editor and the reporters to get their stories in on time? Well, the news editor is the one that is supposed to tell the reporters to file their stories on time. But she herself was late with her own story and wouldn’t tell the reporters to meet their deadline. And why didn’t anyone tell the news editor to file her story on time? Because the only person who has the authority to so is the editor in chief – the guy who hired her. I do recall some copy editors saying they needed her story, but they were ignored.
So, the paper was late on election night, delaying the Liberty Times.
But what really made me mad, and what disgusts me about the TT, was the explantion given to the owner of the Liberty Times as to why the TT was late.
The editor in chief of the paper was called upstairs. He blamed those foreigners on the copydesk!!!
When I found out about this, I was very upset and saddened. I had become used to the unfair tactics and decisions that have no logical explanation. But telling lies just to protect yourself at the expense of the people that work very hard to put out the paper each day is just plain WRONG!!!
It’s untolerable.
So you can see, what others have said on these threads is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are two things I realized about the TT.
- When something goes right, the management will take credit, regardless (as most of is the case) of the fact that they had nothing to do with it.
- When something goes wrong, the foreigners will get blamed.
I can go on with other examples of how poorly the paper is run, but why bother? You should get the picture by now. I just wanted to point out that the management of the TT are the ones holding all the cards, that they don’t have to play fair and they don’t. The people that work there have to put up with until they either leave or get fired.
It’s just a mean, ugly place to work at.