Managing your professional and personal reputation in a business where innuendo and false friends are ubiquitous

A couple of interesting insights.  From It's a Business Where You Never Know by Freddie deBoer.

A little tidbit in Choire Sicha’s post about the NYT’s recent efforts to rein in the use of Twitter by their staffers:

An extremely successful reporter, when I worked [at the Times], once asked me if she was in the “rubber room,” referring to the detention places New York City used to send its bad teachers. She was! She had offended a senior leader and was being iced out, but no one would tell her.

This is, before anything else, just a reflection of a specific organization and its famously complex internal politics. What happens at the NYT is to some degree sui generis, a consequence of employing a roster of deeply ambitious people and of being one of a tiny handful of publications whose presence on your resume can still get you a book contract or a big-money job elsewhere. But I also want to nominate this dynamic, of never knowing if you’re in trouble but sensing that you are and facing career consequences because of it, as a ubiquitous feature of professional life in media. Everyone who works in the industry lives with a dim but persistent feeling that they have committed some kind of faux pas and are paying for it, but never know where, what, or why.

[snip]

The entire short-form nonfiction writing economy operates based on reputational issues that are both immensely important for careers and entirely vague and abstract, defined by broad peer attitudes that everyone perceives differently. Being a professional writer or journalist means that there’s this big HR file on you that can either save or damn your career, only rather than being in a corporations’s cloud partition somewhere it sort of floats around in the atmosphere. You know it’s there, and you know it matters, but you can never know exactly what it says or who wrote it.

Part of the issue is that there isn’t much objective evidence that people in media can be evaluated by, measures that prove success. Yes, there are popularity metrics such as clicks, and they are important, but the problems with them are well-known and they tend to be fickle and contextual. 

[snip]

In the past decade I’ve talked to dozens of journalists and writers, away from the internet, about the ceaseless task of managing your professional and personal reputation in a business where innuendo and false friends are ubiquitous. I have never been shy about the fact that I think the obsessive pursuit of popularity with media peers badly hurts the industry, the work it produces, and the people within it. And while the people I’ve talked to away from the public record have pushed back on details, or had their own takes on the issue, or disagreed about the scope or direction of the problem, I have never talked to one of them who did not acknowledge that people in media are in general obsessively concerned with their reputations among their peers, that this has consequences for the industry, and that those consequences are pernicious. But nobody ever seems to want to talk about it. 

I think that deBoer is wrong in the sense that we are all very status oriented and want to know where we are in a particular pyramid.  However, I accept that that dynamic is pervasive, that is detrimental to the journalistic profession, and that it might have characteristics unique to media.

I think the point that most resonated was that there are few media measures of success which can be traced to individuals.  Same is true to an extent in private enterprise but ultimately there are external measures of service or production traceable to individuals.  Perhaps not with great precision but at least some useful accuracy.  

I suspect that journalism has kindred dynamics in universities where the financial stakes are notoriously small and therefore, per Henry Kissinger, the battles for position and prestige are especially bitter.  I would suspect there is also something of this in large governmental bureaucracies.  Where you cannot tie your contribution to a desirable and valuable outcome, then prestige and status become the currency of the land.

I recall in much of unionized Europe, but especially in Britain and Italy in the late sixties and early seventies, unionized personnel in nationalized industries could not generate improvements in industry and therefore were compensated with larger offices, or company vacations.  Status and prestige were critical substitutes for the absence of compensation.