BANG.

The company I work for is MediaNews Group, the 4th largest newspaper chain in the country. I began my journalism career at the San Jose Mercury News, then migrated to the Contra Costa Times, and now work at the Oakland Tribune. I happened to join the industry during the most turbulent era in Bay Area newspaper history, during which my company changed hands 3 times - from Knight Ridder, to McClatchy, and finally to MediaNews.

The Bay Area News Group (or, BANG as seen above) is a new branch of MediaNews. Our company owner, Dean Singleton, currently owns every daily newspaper in the Bay Area except two San Francisco dailies - the Chronicle and the Examiner. To say that this merging of newspapers has been messy would be an understatement - it is chaotic, confusing, and stressful.

I know I don't talk about my job much on here, and the reason is that it's a dangerous time to cause waves in my company. To give a brief description of my job, my title is Web Producer. I manage our online properties and am responsible for everything from moving breaking news to copy editing to programming/coding to managing multimedia to building special projects and features. I am the youngest person in my field and until recently, was the only female. I struggled with my job in the beginning (to say the least) because I never had a chance to transition to full-fledged adulthood. I was hired while finishing my senior year at San Francisco State University, all the while being the managing editor of the school newspaper site and the multimedia editor at the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism.

The paper I'm holding above is SF Weekly, a free publication based in San Francisco. My family and I were Christmas shopping on Geary Blvd. when I saw the cover of the paper from afar. I won't go into the specifics of the article since you can read it here, but suffice it to say that it's a rough time for journalists in our region. Many people assume that since I work with the online side of the company that I'm immune to lay offs, but that isn't true. I'm terrified to even ask for a raise (which I still haven't ever received) and I'm literally barely making enough to pay the bills right now. They say that in order to be a journalist, you have to do it for the love of the job and not for the money...and that statement could not be truer.