# 10 drinking
For a journalist, there are a few things to look forward to. There's the end of an election. The closing of a trial and of course when the town's annual rodeo/festival/art show is finally over. After a long day of grilling public officials, dredging through public records, chasing ambulances and writing 25-inch stories, journalists like to relax with a tall cold one.
The old stereotype of the curmudgeon journalist with a bottle of whiskey in his desk is alive and well today because journalists like to drink.
Between natural disasters, covering triple homicides and reporting on fatal accidents, journalists see some pretty horrific stuff. And since journalist pay ranks around that of a trained circus monkey, they can't afford any psychological help. However, they can afford a $15 bottle of Fighting Cock bourbon.
Nothing takes the edge off after a day of reporting on the scene of drug bust, shifting through six years of financial papers at city hall and stressing over deadlines like a nice shot of low-shelf whiskey or a pint.
Interns and journalists just out of school have all heard the stories of the days when journalists kept flasks in their back pockets and handles of Jim Bean in their filing cabinets. But today, newspapers and their corporate owners shun such habits. But go to any veteran journalist and he'll show you were he keeps his bourbon.
And if journalists don't like to drink because of having to interview a widow who just lost her husband in Iraq, then there is always job security. As one journalist after another exits the newsroom with their severance check in hand, journalists flee to their safe haven – dive bars.
Drinking is done best by journalists in shotty bars and questionable establishments. The kind of places where a journalist might run into the same perps he writes about on his beat.
And while journalists can never really ever take off their journalist hats, while drinking, there is an unspoken ceasefire among journalists. Rival journalists, otherwise would not share more than a glance with each other at a press conference, share stories about griping editors and mayors who like to call journalists sweetie or honey. Editors and journalists, who in a newsroom walk a very palpable line of rank, talk about the cute receptionist and how the publisher is a moron. But after shots have been taken and tabs have been paid, journalists go back trying to scoop the competition and avoiding social interaction with editors.
You can tell a journalist's bar by names such as Trail Dust, Cell House 7 and Top Hat Lounge. Such dingy hole in the wall watering holes will typically have two beers on tap, PBR and Budweiser, and a well of cheap liquor.
Here journalists gather to complain about the death of their industry and how much they miss the good ol' days. Most of the time such bars are a stone's throw from the newsroom so weary journalists won't have to stumble too far to wet their dry pallet's.
A good beer and a shot is just the medicine for any spent journalist who survived another treacherous day in the trenches reporting the truth. To report the news is to be a journalist. Same goes for drinking. Drinking is so much a part of a journalist's life that J-schools nearly made it part of the curriculum but instead choose copy editing. And journalism has suffered ever since.
Salude'
#75 low pay
Journalists like to think of themselves as the regular working man/woman. Journalist like to kick the same dust as regular folks. Yes there are the millionaire reporters. But those are as rare as readers who subscribe to more than one newspaper. But for the journalists who are not Brian Williams or Rick Reilly, it's the reality of living paycheck to paycheck.
When selecting a career, journalists knew they would make sacrifices: long hours, working holidays and low pay.
When young journalism students ask veteran journalists for advice, virtually all veterans reply with "go to business school."
However, journalists like the low pay because it allows them to focus on the news at hand rather than investing in the crashing stock market, buying a home in foreclosure or saving for retirement.
In fact, thanks to low pay journalists can forget about retirement entirely. Instead they focus on more important things like the city's $5 billion budget or the proposed salary increase for police, even though the crime rate has risen by 25%.
Journalists don't have to worry about such annoying issues like a balanced diet or traveling to exotic places. Thanks to low pay, journalists can eat Ramen noodles or soup in a can every day for lunch and dinner, and spend their days off valeting their publisher's cars to pay the rent. In journalism, the good die poor.
But perhaps the thing journalists like most about low pay is being able to complain about it. One thing journalists like most is complaining, and complaining about low pay is at the top of their list. Go to any local watering or dive bar where journalists congregate and be a fly on the wall one evening after deadline.
You are sure to hear the topic of low pay come up at some time, usually in the context of "damn I wish I had gone to business school."
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