Nezua Leaves MTV Street Team

SINCE I KNOW THAT THE TALK SHOWS WILL BE ALIGHT with speculation, let me set the record straight right away. I have resigned from the MTV Street Team, for which I worked, representing the state of Oregon as the statewide Citizen Journalist Street Team member.

And I’ve written this post a few times, trying to get it right.

I’m not here now or later to slam my supervisors. The vice president of MTV News was my editorial guy, the person who checked my pieces and would tell me if copyright issues were a problem, and who ostensibly would have input on stories if that were required. (Only once did he tell me a piece was a bit long, to which I replied that I was trying to give MTV their money’s worth, and we laughed. At least I did.) And my feelings on him are not the issue, anyway. Though he was probably my favorite person there. That was James Fraenkel, who has actually just left MTV News himself, but after 15 years of employment.

The two people “under” him, who were in charge of the project and over the Street Team—I am quite sure they did the best they could with what they’ve been given. 

Yesterday I spent a while writing this post and outlining my trail of disappointment. I have many thoughts and even documentation on just how and when and where the ideal of this gig soured into something far less exciting and far more limited than originally proposed and imagined.

I have just deleted that version of this post. Not from my server, just from this page. It is not that I am afraid of the legal threats they love to wave at us. I am not afraid in the slightest of Viacom and their army of lawyers. Shit, kid. I got the blogosphere on my side. This posse rolls millions deep, cabrón!

But after writing and reading the post as written, I had to weigh what my purpose was in outlining all of it. Was it to justify leaving? To clear myself? Was it just to take personal retribution for suffering frustration? Of course, none of these would be sufficient cause for me to take any risk or start anything. And I don’t want to appear vengeful or as if I am satisfying personal pettiness or biting a hand that has fed me for half a year. The truth is that for much of the time (especially the winning and the three day orientation and gala welcoming/meeting event in manhattan!) it was a lot of fun, and I remain, overall, very grateful for the experience. But it was important for me to understand how something I felt so good about originally (though I did have my qualms) could turn out to be something I wanted no part of.

That doesn’t mean I’ll hesitate to post it or lay down facts here and there as I see fit, should the need arise organically. Because while I do not currently see a need to unload all of that, neither do I think that I ought to obscure certain facts about the venture if revealing them will help serve as needed truth. As I can’t be completely sure where it all falls, I’ll err on the side of restraint.

Some of it is just a bad fit in the end. I find that this hectic pace of making stories once a week, doing everything yourself from investigating, calling, writing, shooting, editing, marketing…it demands your stories remain superficial to a point. I want to go deeper. 

I will not remark on the ratio of pay given to hours spent to make a piece except to say I couldn’t make it worth it and still create quality.

I will not remark on the attitudes and general management style of my supervisors except to say we had more than a few pleasant exchanges in all of it and I choose to focus on that.

Nota: No small part of my consideration to keep this post as spare as possible was also that friends are still working on this crew…and I wasn’t sure how good I felt about writing all I did knowing that. Nahmeen? Related, I also don’t want to unduly bias the mind of whomever the next person to rep Oregon happens to be, should they find my blog. (Unknown person, I remind you, your experience may vary widely from mine. Most of the original Street Team crew is still working for MTV, and from what I know seem to be happy to do so.)

But I will say this in general, as I prepare to detach myself finally and fully from the MTV Street Team and ship back my “free” laptop. camera, hard drive and peripherals:

1. What I love about “Teams” is that they work with each other and are for each other and talk to one another and do their best to win what it is for which they fight. Whether it’s a scrimmage game or a championship game, when they find unfairness or a lack of integrity on the field, they call it out.

If a “team” is discouraged from solidifying, working and talking together or calling out unfairness, well, it may be a “group” or  ”crowd” or a “bunch” or a “roster” but it is not a “Team.”

2. What I love about Citizen Journalism—the idea and the practice in its true (and only) form—is that it is truth finding its way to people unhampered by conventional filters and guards. Despite the best of intentions, a large corporate entity is built to work in direct contradiction to this idea. Bring them together and you can have a citizen journalism flavor. But you do not have what I love about or understand as “Citizen Journalism.”

and perhaps a bit less on the philosophical side,

3. When other factors are less than perfect and regardless—never. Fuck. With. My. Paycheck. In doing so, You have messed up a rent payment, a credit card payment, other payments and my entire feeling of security in one blow. You have rendered my cabinet scarce (and there is a child here).* You have greatly inconvenienced and embarrassed me in a few situations at once and have kept my nervous system nailed to the sound of the Postal delivery person’s footsteps. 

 

Done. 

And, as always, we move on.

*I am replacing the roughly 30 hours a week that job tried to take from me with other work, so don’t worry about my daughter’s food or my security, peeps!