Byline Quotas/Counts

We're largely web-based these days, but we have a weekly byline quota and a yearly page-view goal. Raises and promotions are at least in part decided by the latter.

 

We had them in a very secretive way at one point, which is to say there was a general number you were expected to hit each month. But that expected number was vague, and the monthly count was never released (though it would occasionally leak out).

When I was doing preps my SE told me to start putting my name on really basic things that should have just been a "staff reports," just to keep my count as high as possible.

My biggest problem with it was they chose not to look at the big picture. When the college football beat writer had by far the most bylines during the season, he wasn't given any extra congratulations. But when that number dipped in the offseason, he'd hear about it.

 

I don't know this - or even largely suspect it - but i sometimes wonder if I contributed to my own layoff a few years back by putting "staff reports" on items that I had no business putting my name on. We literally had writers put their byline on "According to Joe Blow on podunkpress.com..." and literally, the only original reporting was the byline and others would put their names on press releases that had very little redone (mainly just light editing).

This happened in print and web. By time I finally gave in and starting stealing others work, it was already too late.

At my current shop, I always put a "posted by deskmonkey1" when I put stuff online unless I'm just putting up a reporter's story.

 

They did it for a while at my old place. Basically, they thought the sports guys were slacking off because we were never in the office when everyone else was.
Turns out we had double the byline counts and when you added in photo bylines - which they also counted - our numbers were 4-5 times higher than any news reporter. They also figured who did how many pages of layout each week and saw we were doing as many pages, if not more, than the editors who had one section to do per week.
So after a month or two, they stopped.

 

^^^

This kind of crap has been going on for decades.

Why can't news editors figure out that sports writers and sports editors work harder than they do?

 

Our ME has been doing them since last summer, but as far as I know they're not tied to anything. They've only been brought up, one way or the other, a couple of times, and it usually hasn't been in a negative way. I think he's just using them to keep tabs on who's staying busy and who isn't.

Now, that said, he has done something in the same vein that makes me want to see him hit by a bus.
Earlier this summer, I came in early on a Saturday. The plan was to do one of our high school football teams' picture day in the morning, write some tab stories for a few hours, then go cover a youth baseball tournament in the afternoon before coming back to put the section out in the evening.
Shitty, long, 15-hour day, but it was planned for. I had the day before off and he said OK to it earlier in the week. I wasn't complaining about it. I've done it plenty of times.
I grabbed some lunch on the way back to the office from picture day, and ate while I wrote. I never clocked out since I basically just went through the drive thru. Baseball ended up getting rained out, so I wrote a story on that from a phoner along with three other stories from picture day and still did the section and still worked 15 hours -- without a break. My meal breaks were the drive thru stop I never clocked out for, and eating leftovers at my desk.
ME calls me into the office on Monday and reads me the riot act, accusing me of "wasting his time." Somehow, me working a 15-hour shift with no breaks, in which I wrote four stories and paginated a six-page section was taking advantage of him. Apparently, since the baseball tournament was rained out I didn't still have all of that work to do. In his mind, since I'd told him earlier in the week that it was going to be a 50-hour week based on what there was to do, I was determined to get 50 hours and milk all the overtime I could (for the record, I ended up around 47 hours for the week).
I told him, basically, bullshit, and that I could account for every minute of that day without shame.
Big mistake. The next day he created a spreadsheet that I have to fill out with what I do every 10 minutes. This is now part of my daily routine and, ironically, adds about an hour to my total time worked each week.
He said it was going to be part of a larger project to make everyone more efficient, but almost two months later I'm still the only one who has to do it. Even the girl who fucking fell asleep at her desk three times in the month she's worked here isn't subjected to this.
Every time I have to fill this thing out -- and I know he's not looking at it, but I've had some issues with him recently and I'm afraid to just leave it blank or go over his head with a complaint -- it crushes my soul a little bit more.

 

You have the worst luck with MEs, Batman.

I had a former ME one time make everyone detail how much they spent on this and that, but not to the extent you have to do. Anyway, my boss was told flat out that the time he spends slotting out the section doesn't count. Nor did making the schedule, which took about three days when done around his usual day-to-day stuff. And there was something else that he was told didn't count that escapes me now but I remember standing slackjawed when he told us it didn't count.

 

That is ridiculous. Accounting for every minute is something you'd expect McDonald's or Burger King to do, not a newspaper.

 

Believe it or not, DM, I've only had three in a decade and a half in the business. The current one has been ... problematic, shall we say. Has a terrible tendency to overreact to slights, real or imagined.
This happened a few weeks after the Ballad of AME-1 from the "Dear Dimwit" thread. I have no doubt the two are related, but things have calmed down for the moment. So, as soul-crushing as this, is I'm just going with the flow and trying to tell myself two things:
1) It is adding an hour a week to my duties, which pisses me off, but which I'm also getting paid for. And since I'm working more than 40 hours every week, it is at an overtime rate.
2) Eventually he'll lose interest in this nonsense and just stop creating the spreadsheet every week. I sure as hell ain't going to say anything when he does. I thought he'd done just that a couple of weeks ago, but then it reappeared like a drunken ex-girlfriend stumbling to the door at 3 a.m.

 

I love it when that happens.

 

I've been told by coworkers that we have to clock out for a break every six hours, because otherwise we could theoretically go back and sue the company for violating some labor law that mandates break times. Something like that...

 

Isn't it every four hours?