Thursday, September 27, 2007

Media / News Breaking News: We hired a Mexican!!!

Posted by Joe Tone on Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 12:07 PM

gus.jpg
Gus Garcia-Roberts: Our Mexican.
The bosses issued this press release today. Pretty exciting stuff. CLEVELAND, Ohio, Sept. 27, 2007 – Further establishing itself as northeast Ohio’s premiere alternative weekly, and sending a clear message that it is committed to workplace diversity, Scene proudly announced today that it hired a Mexican guy. At the regular staff meeting in the paper’s downtown newsroom, Scene’s editorial staff officially welcomed 25-year-old Gus Garcia-Roberts to its ranks. “Today is a red-letter day,” Managing Editor Joe Tone tearfully told the staff, while taking his turn at the makeshift piñata hanging in the newsroom. “I’d like to thank Gus for checking ‘Hispanic’ on his HR forms. Had he not been so thorough, we would have continued under the impression he was a kinda creepy engineering major, like the Gus I knew in college.” In an interview after the meeting, Tone said the paper “definitely didn’t hire Gus because he’s a Mexican.” “But we totally would have,” he added. “We just didn’t know he was Mexican. I swear to God.” The paper also didn’t know it was supposed celebrate and publicize the hiring of minorities, until the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a front-page story and picture announcing the hiring of a black managing editor. The paper had been under fire for the ethnic and racial makeup of its newsroom, which is mostly white, except for a few really white people. Scene later came under fire itself, when a reader wrote a letter to the editor, accusing the paper of having a “staff [that] actually prides itself -- to the point of drunken, public bragging -- on its total lack of diversity.” “So when we found out Gus’s dad was Mexican, we were like, ‘Sweet!’” Tone said. “To think, we actually interviewed this guy, read his stories. Hell, I almost called one of his references! And all we had to do was look at his last name!” Originally, Tone said, the editors hired Garcia-Roberts because they thought he “might not suck,” and believed he might be “pretty fun to get drunk with, and whatnot.” The paper did hope Garcia-Roberts would add to the staff’s diversity, not because he was Mexican, but because he came from New York. “We don’t hire many assholes,” Tone said. The arrival of Garcia-Roberts, a staff writer, is already paying dividends for Scene’s readers. While previous editors failed to fully capitalize on his Mexican-ness, dispatching him to cover such un-diverse topics as midget wrestling, Scene allowed Garcia-Roberts to put his heritage to work, encouraging him to “follow his Hispanic heart,” Tone said. The young writer’s first story for the paper, published this week, is about a historic Ohio wheel company whose shiny rims are now popular among low-rider enthusiasts in California. “Never in a million years did I think we would be so lucky to get the word vato into the pages of this newspaper,” Tone told the staff, as they scrambled to pick up Double Bubbles and Yum-Yums from the newsroom floor. “Today, we did.”

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“We don’t hire many assholes,” Tone said. I DEMAND A RECOUNT. Unless you're making a distinction between ball-lickers, dick-knobs and assholes. Then, Joe's statement might be accurate.

Posted by Michael A. Miller on September 27, 2007 at 1:49 PM | Report this comment
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Yeah all the people at scene are assholes PERIOD! You better retract that statement.

Posted by John Baldman on September 27, 2007 at 6:03 PM | Report this comment
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Are Mexicans known for having whimpy handshakes? It makes a lot more sense now.

Posted by Alexa on September 28, 2007 at 10:18 AM | Report this comment
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Here's the san jose weekly's take on the paper susan goldberg killed. It totally reflects her lack of personality, humor, interest in anything but expensive meals and spas. Merc assistant editor: "No one likes us" We know the drill. When two newspapers inhabit the same town, they attack each other. They toss the ordinary rules of journalism ethics aside and slam the competition. That's the way it has been done since Ben Franklin was a newspaper publisher. That said, San Jose Metro has printed an extraordinary quote from Matt Mansfield, the Mercury News deputy managing editor assigned to helping "rethink" his paper: "The problem we have is, no one likes us." Apparently he spoke alongside the paper's executive editor, Carole Leigh Hutton, to a crowd of Santa Clara University students wondering about the future of journalism. Here's how Metro reported it: "While Hutton spent a half-hour whining about hemorrhaging ad revenues like a brusque businesswoman, Mansfield cut to the heart of the matter. He's in charge of finding out what readers want — a novel idea — in the hopes of revamping the newspaper's image. All this while the paper's news content and staff have been shaved to a skeleton of what they used to be. Market studies revealed what we've known all along. 'The Mercury News has no personality,' Mansfield said. His point of comparison? 'The Metro has attitude.' What's really going on, Mansfield says, is that people don't want to make the time to read something boring. Always an important, reminder, true, but doesn't San Jose's daily have bigger problems right now? Like front-page hot-dog contest stories, maybe?

Posted by me on December 7, 2007 at 4:09 AM | Report this comment

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