journalism
A Sad Day at ‘Nashville Is Talking’
I really don’t like to talk about my professional life in my personal venue (i.e. my blog) but this is a special occasion, although a sad one.
I produced the content at WKRN.com for 2 1/2 years. Toward the end of my tenure there, Brittney Gilbert became the blogger for the station’s new foray into community-based blogging, Nashville Is Talking. At the time, NIT did something that very few other blogs did — gathered and delivered a personal spin on what Middle Tennessee’s blogger community were talking about. Working without a net and with her own personal opinions often on display (and up for attack by others) Brittney did a fantastic job.
Now, through a series of events that apparently got out of control in a hurry, Brittney has resigned and is leaving WKRN. I really, really hate that she’s leaving on this note after such stellar work. But boy, I can relate to the sentiment of just being fed up.
I’ve had the privilege of working in online media for almost my whole career, and I’m not sure if people understand how absolutely and unnecessarily vicious they can be in responding to things that are written on news sites. People will take a nice, dry news story that has absolutely no opinion indicated and read what they want into it. Then they’ll tell everyone they possibly can how the writer (whom they don’t know from Adam) is clearly leading the general public down the path of partisan destruction. Only, they say it in much more hurtful and profane ways. If I had a penny for every time that I’ve personally been called everything from a liberal pawn to a ******-lover just for writing a news story, I could retire.
And Brittney no doubt had it worse, because she worked in a medium where people are encouraged to voice their opinion as loudly as possible. But much like a traditional online news site, she produced content that reflected the viewpoints of other people. As the site says, the views she published were not necessarily her own or the station’s. Attacking her as a person for a post that someone else originally wrote and attempting to get her fired kinda defeats the point of open discussion.
If you are a reader of online news or blogs similar to NIT, please do your best to step into the shoes of the person on the other side of the keyboard. If you, for example, hate the banking industry and all it stands for, do you go to a bank and cuss out a teller because she asks if you’d like to open a savings account? If someone standing in line in front of you retells a story that you personally find distasteful, do you follow them to their workplace and demand to their boss that they be fired?
Just because someone works in the media doesn’t make them less of a person, and people have feelings. Yes, we make mistakes. If you think we made one, point it out politely and give us a chance to apologize. Really, that’s much more effective than name-calling and threats.
In any case, I hope that Brittney lands somewhere really special soon, and that she is happier. And I hope that whomever replaces her buys firefighter gear beforehand. They’ll need it to protect themselves.
(And on an unrelated note, I also just found out that my former GM, Mike Sechrist, has left WKRN. He was the man who gave me my real start in the biz, and he’s a class act. Best of luck to you, Mike.)
ETA: In case anyone had any questions about my motives in posting this, I recently signed on to begin work shortly at another station in Huntsville, AL, where I fully expect to work happily for many years to come. I have absolutely no desire to try to get Brittney’s job, even if that were an option (and I’m not egotistical enough to think it is.) I enjoyed and appreciated my time at WKRN, but I’ve moved on.
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