Byline quotas....anybody else dealing with this?

Nope. Not anymore. Thank the fucking Lord.

 

Adding to the chorus, this sounds absolutely insane. And I'm sure you're making an obscene salary too, right?

 

If there were only some way to get 15 bylines on a Sunday, you'd be done for the rest of the week. Of course, it could lead to a situation like Chotchkie's.

 

It is insane. I've been in the biz for 10 years and the first couple weeks I nearly had a nervous breakdown every day. I've adjusted mentally (It's amazing what you can do when you have no choice), but it is still brutal. The money is obviously crap, just like everywhere else.

Last week I got 5 bylines on Tuesday and Wednesday so I was able to coast for the rest of the week. But that's not always easy to do. When prep basketball season ends we are going to be in trouble when it comes to finding stories.

I came from a Gannett shop, which obviously had its own problems, but writing 6 or 7 stories a week and doing an agate page per shift is a cakewalk by comparison.

 

I'm indirectly being forced into having to impose byline quotas. The problem I have is that my staff is really small and the publisher wants us to have extremely local content. I am allowed some AP content, but the front and first couple of pages have to be local. It's basically everyone does two to three or stories a day or there just isn't enough local to fill the paper.

 

I had this situation at my previous journalism gig.

The publisher and CEO were adamant about five stories a week. When I first got there, we had two full-time reporters who were averaging about two or three stories a week and we ran a lot of wire. Since I didn't know better at the time, I reinforced the five stories a week quota my second day on the job. (Fortunately, I wasn't subject to the whole five stories a week thing myself.)

I very quietly ignored the five stories a week thing whenever I could. When I started getting a lot of student writers, I would tell my full-timers to concentrate on quality over quantity, especially when it got to the point that I would start begging our production manager for MORE space. Then again, that was one reason I'm now the former editor of that paper.

 

When I was working as interim managing editor, I ended up having to impose a quota on the news reporters because one of them felt like she was doing twice as much as the others.

Later, when it became obvious I was going to be doing this for a while and I decided to look at things a little closer, it turned out that the school beat she had been assigned by the previous ME was the problem. She was covering both of the county's school districts and covering law enforcement (police, sheriff, fire department). I split them up and, whaddya know, all of a sudden, the workload was being distributed more equally and she felt less overwhelmed. After that, I lifted the quotas because everyone finally had enough to keep them busy without being overworked.

But the thing that was bad about it was that the publisher decided that the stories also had to have a minimum word count to be bylined (300). Otherwise, they were just a "staff report" and didn't count toward the quotas. There were two problems with that: 1) No one wanted to re-write press releases because those typically came in under the word count and B) Sometimes you did quite a bit of work on a 285-word story but it didn't count toward your quota.

By the time our new managing editor was hired, I was pretty much ignoring the word-count rule. After the newsroom was cut from three reporters to two, I didn't care how long the damn story was as long as it ate up some space.

 

That's the other thing about byline counts: They strongly discourage you from working on anything that isn't a byline.

 

We used to have a daily two-story minimum and there was one certainty about it. While working on your first story, all you cared about was finishing it to start on your second. The accountants/editors also tried to say that daily minimum meant 14 stories a week and not 10.

 

I've worked at places that had them, but they were small papers with small sports sections, and we were busting our asses anyway, so it was never a problem hitting the number. We rarely even thought about it. But I think they're completely wrong and stupid, for all the reasons already cited here.

 

Dumbest thing of which I've ever heard. You run into an editor who lives by vendetta (as I had at the last shop I worked) and it's just a no-win situation. Stuff like this (along with furloughs, hyperlocal emphasis, etc.) is why I'd have to be knocked off my feet to consider working at a newspaper again.

 

Three words: Really big pictures