Victoria Advocate Reviews

In 18 months, I watched more than 40 people enter and leave a newsroom of ~35 total staff members. When turnover is that high, you know that there is a fundamental problem in the workplace. That fundamental problem comes from the fact that management simply refuses to trust anyone with anything. Whether you're writing on a beat, designing a page or putting together web elements, management - particularly the CEO - feels an overwhelming need to be the smartest person in the room, even if that manager or CEO doesn't know how to make a solution themselves for a specific situation. One major source I witnessed was from the "digital efforts" the company claims they try. The fact of the matter is that management doesn't want anything to do with digital. Print is the primary project, and newspaper sales are the name of the game to this paper (Fun fact: we once held a company-wide party because newspaper sales went up 4% in one financial quarter). Management outsourced all digital work to the paper's sister company/ad agency, then promptly ran off not one, not two, but three different contract workers because they refused to believe someone with digital experience could possibly know a little bit more than management. This struggle of power for trust is overwhelmingly rampant, and it trickles down to every facet of the company. Few work at this company to do journalism, but many work to make sure they don't get the ire of their bosses. That ire comes in several forms, but in an effort to "keep everyone informed," there's no shortage of announcing shortcomings of workers to the company at large. Public shaming via company-wide email is a very popular form of "discipline" for editors, and managers somehow double their efforts to bombard workers via email during a manager's day off. It gets even worse when a negative or even neutral negative comment is said online or on social media by a reader/viewer/consumer, because management will do anything they can to eviscerate themselves from that comment. If you go to work at this company, expect to be publicly reamed in a Facebook comment at least twice in your tenure, solely because a reader got angry or offended at your article and management thinks publicly involving you will solve the problem. Semi-related to that, work/life balance is a complete and utter joke at this company. Management constantly needed to know what I was doing in the evenings or on weekends "because you never know when you need to help us." Getting PTO approval was a nightmare, and long hours were demanded without equal overtime compensation. Overall, I strongly recommend potential job seekers to find a different news company as a place of employment.

The management at this place is awful. I find it embarrassing that someone in management felt it necessary to write a few fake reviews in order to save face on this website. This can be seen by the slew of positive reviews that all happened to show up on the same day. Things like that only highlight the way things are run at this company. Expect to be publicly and passive aggressively ridiculed via mass email at least a handful of times in your first year at the paper. This will continue in years to come, however most young journalist choose to leave here before or at their one-year mark. The editor-in-chief has created a poisonous work environment where employees are either too paranoid of public humiliation or too disgruntled by passive aggressive behavior to do their jobs well. I have never worked at a place where so many talented people love their career but hate their job. Editors are constantly undermined by the editor-in-chief and have virtually no say in how their section is run. Reporters are told to write stories in a way that will please the editor-in-chief instead of being allowed much creative freedom in their work. Morale is at an all-time low for several other reasons, as well. Mileage reimbursement was cut to 27 cents per mile earlier in the year. I was told that one editor even pulled out a calculator in order to determine if it would be cheaper to have a reporter drive through the night only to return the next morning rather than have that reporter find a hotel. HR is a whole different mess. It is impossible to reach anyone if problems arise. Multiple emails go unanswered, and the only real way to get anything done is through constant face-to-face persistence. Confidentiality is spit at. In conclusion, I would not recommend this job to anyone talented enough to find something somewhere else.