Saaaaaaaammmmmm Not been the best week for getReading and Mr Low with Yermas Dildo going viral, literally all over Twitter and FB on various football sites, unless they see all publicity as good publicity...
I actually did a weeks work experience at the Reading Post (back in the paper days) Sportsdesk a few years back (think it was during the Adkins era). Having been told journalism is meant to be fast-paced and highly-pressured I was a bit surprised by how laid back the whole office was and how little work was actually done
Basically the paper would come out Weds and Fri so everything had to be done by Tuesday and then Thursday evening to send off to print. That meant Monday was spent chatting about the weekend's football, not really doing much work, and then the next day we'd find a bunch of stories on Sky Sports, fit them into the allocated pages, and if we didn't have enough content we'd just make the pictures bigger. Same process on Weds/Thurs. And then Friday was a day off. The only fast-pace was the rush at about 4pm on a Tues/Thurs when we realised we hadn't actually done any work and a paper was due the next day
Low was genuinely a nice guy, happy to have a conversation with you, looked after me the whole week, actually gave me interesting things to do each day. Didn't come across a great 'journalist' , but it's not like anyone working there really did tbf. Watts sat next to me every day and barely registered my existence, getting blanked by him for a week kinda put me off him for the rest of his getReading career. The one time he spoke to me was to ask me to write a report on a Reading U21 win the previous night, it got printed in the paper but he didn't comment on it or give me any advice/pointers, which you'd think is the point of work experience
Obviously the job will be different now there's no newspaper or deadlines to meet, but I couldn't help feel the paper would have done a bit better if there had been a bit more effort and enthusiasm in the office. Maybe I was a naive kid having my eyes opened to the real world for the first time. It's not a difficult job, and honestly if Trinity Mirror have the funds to replace Watts then we'll see normal service resume
It's possibly difficult to get the enthusiasm to run around like a Duracell bunny and work your arse off when you know your time is numbered job wise to be fair.
