Columnist Discusses The 'Realities' Of Newspapers p.17

By: ALLAN WOLPER GAIL COLLINS IS a New York Times columnist who has experienced the downsizing pain that has depressed so many New York City journalists.
"Pat Buchanan's campaign is no news to people in journalism," Collins smiled wryly at a group of aspiring reporters. "I have been working in journalism going on 25 years and have never left an organization that was still standing."
Collins said she left United Press International when it went into Chapter 11, bailed out of the New York Daily News when a strike brought it to near financial death, then lost her column at New York Newsday when it folded last summer.
"This is not a business you go into for financial security," she said. "It is a wonderful business, but it is totally insecure."
Collins, who is a member of the New York Times editorial board, says she couldn't understand why reporters stayed with news organizations when they hated working for it.
"There are people at the New York Times who are totally unhappy," Collins said. "But they won't leave because they've been there for 10 years and they've waited so long to get there. So they do their job and go someplace to drink and forget how miserable they are."
Collins warned the students not to expect newsrooms full of mentors charting their careers, mainly because they are more consumed with getting their job done.
"Once you get a job, no one will help you," she cautioned. "People who go into journalism are not good at interacting. And the way it works, the best reporters become editors."
Collins said the reporters turned editors have a hard time dealing with the individual emotional problems that are common in newsrooms.
"They all seem to have a habit of throwing a football in the air when you ask them questions," she smiled.
Collins told a story about some minority journalists she knew at the New York Daily News who were crying out for some emotional feedback.
"Finally, one of them asked an editor, 'Can you tell me how I am doing?' and he said, 'just about where we thought you'd be,' " the columnist recalled. "The reporter finally moved to Cleveland."
The journalism business, according to Collins, is one in which a reporter has to make his or her own breaks.
"You have to track your own career," she said. "No one will do it for you."
Collins walked around in front of the room from time to time consulting notes as her audience scribbled furiously in their chairs.
She gave as an example of the arbitrary life of journalism the way she landed a column at the Daily News.
"They never had a woman as an upfront columnist," Collins said. "I had been covering the Statue of Liberty centennial for six months and I went in and asked to be given a chance to write a column.
"They told me that they're getting someone from Kentucky in three months."
Collins asked to be a temporary stand-in until the new journalist was hired, but her editors patronized her.
"They said they didn't want me to do it because they said it would humiliate me," she reported. "But I told them I didn't care. They said, 'OK.' I did it for three months. And then the woman from Kentucky decided she didn't want to come and I kept the column."
She cautioned, however, to learn how to straddle the journalistic line that separates enthusiastic job seekers from naggers. "You can't fight them," Collins laughed. "You can only manipulate them."