Generally speaking, a mailroom is the place where you begin your career.
Except at the Newark Star-Ledger, that is–the paper being, apparently, the Official News Source of the Bizarro World. Per E&P’s Joe Strupp:
When a newspaper cuts its staff, those who remain in the depleted newsroom become valuable. But as The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. slowly says farewell to 151 newsroom folks who took buyouts last month, at least two longtime journalists have been reassigned to the mailroom.
Reporter Jason Jett and Assistant Deputy Photo Editor Mitchell Seidel have been filing, sorting, and delivering mail for more than a week, according to sources.
Jett and Seidel, who could not be reached for comment, apparently declined to take one of the buyouts offered this fall as part of a companywide move to cut costs.
Yeah. We look forward to upcoming weeks, when it will be revealed that Jett and Seidel have returned to high school, and that Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady has returned to the womb.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.