The more you yell, the less I care

Angry editor: How not to run a newsroom, Part One.

The fictional Daily Bugle editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson, from Marvel's Spider-Man, has become a comic favorite as Peter Parker's perpetually angry boss. In real life, however, such editors disrupt the smooth running of newsrooms and create toxic workplaces.

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The managing editor, a large, pale, misshapen man who more often than was tasteful wandered around the newsroom in his underwear, was having difficulty teaching one of his reporters something on the computer.

The reporter, a petite woman from the Philippines, was seated facing the monitor, first with her hands on the keyboard and then in her lap. She may have said a few words at first, but she had since gone silent.

The editor stood to her left, slightly behind her. At first his voice was low and reasonable, but the volume steadily rose. What exactly he wanted her to learn was unclear.

“Where’s the picture? Show me the picture! What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Do what I say! Listen to me! Why can’t you learn? What’s the matter with you?” he shouted, or words to that effect. Eventually he seemed to forget the task at hand and his tirade became a personal attack.

“You’re useless! You’re stupid! You can’t learn! Why can’t you learn? I should send you home! What do you think you’re doing? Why are you crying?”

This was not the first sign something was terribly wrong in this newsroom, but it was the clearest yet that the problem sat squarely in the boss’ chair. He liked yelling. His usual victim of choice was the one who appeared the weakest. When he spewed his angry bile at the Filipina writer she rarely tried to defend herself. When she did – by meekly attempting to explain why she did not understand what he wanted of her – his rage only grew hotter, until he was shouting the same insults over and over again, louder and louder. The only way she could make it stop was by fleeing in tears. Once she was gone, the editor’s rage persisted, forcing him to storm from one end of the office to the other until he ended up out in the street furiously puffing on a nicotine vape.

The job advertisement had made the position seem ideally challenging – and challenging it was, but for all the wrong reasons. The managing editor was looking for someone who could take over the news function so he could concentrate less on journalism and more on administration. The hours seemed reasonable, the pay adequate and the opportunities for professional growth boundless. The skills demanded in the ad, however, said nothing about needing an ability to tolerate verbal abuse and frequent temper tantrums.

The first indication that the job might have been better avoided arose from a question I posed: “Why did you choose that font for the website masthead?” The editor only heard the implied criticism of his choice. He immediately took offence and instead of answering he erupted into anger – although, to be sure, nothing as explosive as he would later demonstrate.

“All I get is complaints about the font! Why does everyone always go on about the font? It’s futuristic!”

While my question had not been a complaint, it did in truth contain a certain amount of constructive criticism. I had intended my query to act as a door into a wider discussion about the appearance of the website, which needs some improvement.

To be blunt, it is entirely unappealing: crowded and disorganized. It is not merely messy, but chaotic. The separate news departments are not clearly differentiated and nothing is easy to find. The website’s masthead, to crown off the ugliness, looks like it had been designed in the 1980s for a bad Atari game. In the 1940s it might have been futuristic, but nearing 2020 it was only amateuristic and out-dated.

Of course, I had not been planning on saying any of this – at least, not in that way. Nevertheless, I had assumed that as editor one of my responsibilities would be to help improve the publication any way I could. However, I had assumed wrong.

In fact, I was soon to learn that any attempt to offer suggestions on how to do anything in any way that was different from what the editor envisioned – let alone actually doing something differently, regardless of whether he had adequately explained what he wanted – sparked an angry rejection that quickly descended into deeply personal insults delivered at high volume.

These frequent and irrational bouts of anger explained several things I had noticed. In all conversations involving the managing editor, only the editor’s voice was audible. When he was not talking to someone, in person or on the phone, the newsroom was uncharacteristically quiet, with reporters communicating in near whispers with each other for fear of attracting unwanted attention. Also, much of the final published copy contained numerous errors of fact and grammar introduced by the managing editor himself because no one dared to correct him.

That was my first three days of work. Stay tuned for more.