Pros
Let's start with the positive - the Commercial Dispatch is a good newspaper. Unexpectedly good, for its size and location. It's well connected to its community and it has higher quality coverage than a lot of big-ticket national outlets. There were times I loved working there and thought my job was great.
Cons
That said, my total experience there was profoundly negative. This is not a safe workplace for the careers of young and developing journalists. I am in year 5 of my career, and prior to relocating across the country for this job I'd never had any significant negatives in the reviews of my performance. My experience at the Commercial Dispatch was significantly harmful professionally. There wasn’t really an onboarding process, and this is a job that badly needs one. That plus an opaque editing pipeline created constant uncertainty about the status of articles and what we needed for the next issue. News writing has a low margin for error even under good conditions, so you can imagine how stressful this was for me and other workers. Nevertheless we made it work and I was adjusting to work there, getting positive feedback from my editors and even from random people in my coverage area. Then six months in I was terminated with no warning. There was a complete absence of the normal feedback and corrective process. No: 1) meeting to even let me know there was an issue, 2) chance to react and adjust, 3) written notice that I was at risk of or slated for firing. They declined to do any sort of exit interview and never gave any concrete examples of things I had done wrong. One day everything is going great, the next our "work relationship is no longer salvageable" and I'm being walked out of the building. Thankfully my old job is happy to have me back, because again, I’ve never had any significant work issues. But for an employee without a support net, significant savings and a landlord willing to take mercy lease-wise, this kind of treatment could be disastrous. Top and bottom line – beware of a toxic and harmful work experience.