Do you have a weekly byline minimum?

If you're on a daliy beat in season, 5-10 stories per week should be easy.
If you're general assignment or full-time enterprise or on a longer-term projects team, it's what your editor wants and it's very irregular. Sometimes you have a lot of bylines and copy all at once, then hardly any at all for weeks or months.
The latter positions don't exist at smaller papers obviously but bigger papers still see them as important to the future because they can generate memorable unique content.

 

I have never worked for a peper that had byline minimums or quotas.
I seems stupid to me to tell someone you have to produce X numnber of bylined stories a week. It seems you're just tryng to fill a section with shit.

 

The problem with that is, you want to make sure people are doing their work. The only way some people can see you're busting your ass is to see the number of bylines you have.

Never mind that it may be 10 stories of 200 words each rather than two 1,000-word stories.

Me? I've given byline counts as a guideline. I look more at quality. I'd rather have two stories that are both killer than have five so-so stories or even one great story, two so-so stories and two shitty stories.

 

My shop doesn't have any minimums, at least sports doesn't. We all write and we all have desk duties. Some of the guys with the bigger beats write more because people care more about those beats and there is more news coming out of them. If our high schools are on the road for a few games I might not have a byline for a few days. Then when a big event is in town I'll have multiple bylines on multiple days in a row.
The news writers at my shop are expect to have at least two centerpiece stories a week and I think at least one story a day. News reporters don't have desk duties and those guidelines are in place to make sure each day we have local centerpieces for A1 and the city section front.

 

I would hope the managers would be a little more hands-on than counting bylines after the fact.

Have writers submit a monthly budget. These are the events I'm covering. There are feature ideas I have. Here is an idea for takeout or two.

Some things may fall through. Other times stories may break. But the budget should let the manager know if the writer is working hard.

 

We don't have individual byline counts to hit. Our ME does give us a monthly goal to hit as a department.

 

Down here, it means they are paying the coach. Seriously, it's ridiculous.

We don't have an official byline count in sports, because enough of our stuff is weekly (specialty pages, preview features, etc...) that we are all always working. News is required to put out seven stories a week, and a Sunday centerpiece once a month.

 

We have some of same issues here in the newside.
We have reporters who don't do much other than shoot out two 8-inch stories a day to maintin their daily quota.
Yet another reporter may file a quailty, informative 24 inch story on top of a couple of briefs or another 12-inch story.

I'm not saying the quota is right or wrong - because it doesn't factor in things like inch count - but it does help keep the slack offs from well, slacking off.

As I stated earlier, in sports here it's not a big deal, cause our writers work pretty hard.

 

I just write stories until I have my days off. Then I come back and write more. I never really count.

 

I run a weekly budget meeting. Our full-time reporter tells me what she's doing every week. I have my own stories to do. Then there are the stories our freelancers and stringers do.

It's the bean counters/bosses who read byline counts after the fact.

 

My last job: 10 bylines per week. The ME hired a part-time copy editor. One shift per week was spent with seven days' worth of papers and a spreadsheet to count up bylines.

Doesn't sound too bad, but I had one design shift per week, so I had four days (in theory) to churn out those bylines. Eventually, the ME relented to say that if you put together briefs enough to fill 12 inches, it would count as a byline. During regional or state tournaments, it wasn't a problem. During the summer, I covered a shit load of American Legion baseball and amateur golf tournaments.

The last few months of my job, I found it much easier to stay in more often and take calls. I'd average around 40 inches per night from calls and another six or eight early in the shift from announcements and camp notices. I'd put away six or seven "bylines" in two shifts. (I have no idea how they kept up with who wrote how many briefs.) By then, I had a foot out the door, so it didn't matter to me.

 

When I had a run in with my editor last summer, he said the company (in this case, Ogden) is trying to push 2 bylines per reporter per day. However, because my job includes all sorts of side demands, 5 per week is normally enough to keep the news editor (who, because we have a small shop, is basically an uber-boss) off my case. Nowadays, I only run into problems when I'm looking flagrantly non-productive (in the above case, I asked my SE what our tee time was while the editor in question was having a bad day).

Besides, now if I run into problems, I can always produce a copy of the issue this February in which I had seven bylines (four in a postseason preview tab, two in a news special section, and one in the regular B section).

At this point, I spend 15 hours a week doing layout, and probably at least another 10 being the interim photo editor.

Other things that complicate this:
1. We're basically just preps, so during the periods between sports seasons (such as the one just concluding now), there's almost nothing to write about besides filler features and weird stuff.

2. We normally give coach-on-the-road calls at least 4-6 inches but we don't take bylines on them.

3. One suggestion the company makes is writing more sidebars and things like that. And then when I threaten to write a sidebar on a gamer, my SE gives me grief because we don't have space for it.

However, during the slow times, we have filler pieces (we actually do season recaps for JV and freshman teams, mostly to get names in the paper), I focus more on my weekly outdoors page and I volunteer for A section things. In fact, an A section story that just kind of landed on my plate ended up being picked up on the state exchange and getting published in the Detroit Free Press, the major metro I read and dreamed about working for as a little boy.