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And the next fist fight at WashPost will be...

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by JayFarrar, Nov 3, 2009.

  1. clutchcargo

    clutchcargo Active Member

    To that "on-duty" ME, here is my detailed explanation:

    Sir/Ma'am: Thomas Boswell's copy came to us after midnight for a World Series game we paid his way to, and we needed that extra time to make his copy free of errors and typos. Mr. Boswell is a great writer prone to producing typos, and on such a tight deadline he had a few more than usual. If you want to be the one to give him his pink slip, be my guest.
     
  2. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    clutchcargo - okay, pink slip it is. But not before I give you a 30 minute explanation of why being four minutes late costs the company money.
     
  3. Moderator1

    Moderator1 Moderator Staff Member

    One final thought from me - I've worked on tight deadlines, written lots of "send at the buzzer" stories, edited a lot. I realize newspapers are all headed toward the Web, sooner than we'd like.
    I think we all agree, however, that what DOES make it into print needs to be as clean as possible, as perfect as it can be. So if your deadlines are tighter and your hands on deck are fewer, stop trying to do as much as you've always done. It can't be done. A refer to the Web and move on.
    Do NOT use deadlines and do NOT use lack of hands as an excuse for sloppy in print. Readers don't care.

    I think we've said all that already and I don't think anyone disagrees. Just wanted to type it again.
     
  4. OrangeGrad

    OrangeGrad Member


    Man, I wish my stuff was in 50,000 papers. I understand the pressure and challenges in producing columns on deadline, but I don't understand how more typos are OK because they're only in 50,000 to 100,000 newspapers.
     
  5. forever_town

    forever_town Well-Known Member

    Absolutely. Though when I was managing editor at my previous shop, I'd usually be first in line to take the bullet since I'd feel I should have caught it.

    As for Moddy's comment about giving clean writers a little more time than you would someone who's error prone, that's exactly what I did. I had a stringer who wrote some of the cleanest copy I've ever seen in my life. It was so good that a former reporter actually came up to me and said, "am I missing something? I could literally find nothing wrong with this."

    I think I had to move a graf ONCE in the two and a half years that stringer worked for me. Needless to say, he was the only person for whom I'd willingly hold a section until right before deadline.
     
  6. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    Yeah, but did you ever offer him a real job? :D
     
  7. forever_town

    forever_town Well-Known Member

    I would have if I were the one controlling the purse strings. Actually, both the editor of the other paper in our group and I approached the owners with a proposal to make him sports editor for both papers. They turned it down.
     
  8. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    So cute. They didn't care when the copy came in, clutch. They didn't care if it didn't come in at all. They cared why we sent at 11:46 instead of 11:45.
     
  9. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    I'm sorry, YGBFKM...some writers are that way, but brilliant in every other way. And you can tell them they shouldn't be that way all you want -- and they still will be. Again, if they're good enough elsewhere, you put up with this -- and in the case of the Post and Boswell, that's obviously the case.
     
  10. joe king

    joe king Active Member

    Hey, Clutch, at our place we've been dressed down for missing deadline by 15 seconds.

    And I'm 100 percent serious.
     
  11. clutchcargo

    clutchcargo Active Member

    OK, you're not Joe King.
     
  12. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    It's a minor threadjack, but what the hell. At one of my stops, the editor went out drinking with lawyers and such on Friday night, and he often called right on deadline to see if we were going to make it, obviously drunk.

    Of course, his calling slowed things down, but that logic didn't work on him. So one time, he called about five minutes from deadline with the usual bitching, and then he called again right at 12:31 (or whatever it was), and I told him we had missed deadline by one minute.

    He told me to be in his office first thing Monday morning, and I was fairly sure I was going to be fired or at least disciplined.

    So I show up at his office at 9 a.m. and he walks in a minute later and says, "What the hell are you doing here?" And I told him he had summoned me because we missed deadline by one minute.

    He thinks it over about 15 seconds -- obviously he can't remember that any of this happened -- and says, "Oh. Well, don't let it happen again."

    And that was that.

    Carry on with saying why Boswell needs to learn how to spell and not make any typos RIGHT NOW!
     
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