Last night was the first Friday in seven years I had no calls to take . . . . .

Re: Last night was the first Friday in seven years I had no calls to take . . .

Nothing wrong with the instinct, Piotr; most writers I've worked with have it too. But if I'm on desk and see you're busy taking a phoner when I'm waiting on your story, I'm going to tell you to let it ring and finish first.

 

It's not so much the "oh, I'm too busy to help" bit, but at the places I've written/phoned, the desk staff was of the same mindset of buck's -- they want the story first. If we missed a couple calls, either the coaches would call back or we could chase them later, once the story was being edited.

 

No one here is debating the ease or difficulty of writing a gamer. We're just saying that a well-run office allows the writers to write, then help out with any calls that are left over.

Again, with all the martyrdom.

 

I don't get how anyone can dispute that, shotglass. High school gamers - yes, even the sainted football gamers - are not a challenge to write, and write well.

StraightEdge: "Martyrdom"?

With all due respect, that's an asinine way of looking at it. No one here is bitching about doing their job, no matter what the tasks are. And with the way staffing is going across the industry, being "well-run" will not overcome lack of bodies.

I never assume a coach will call back, by the way. And having to "chase them later" is one of the many reasons I started this thread.

 

The computer stat packages some schools have finally started using are a godsend, if they're run by somebody with a clue.

The last 18 months I was in newspapers, some of my coaches figured out how to export the stats as HTML and attach them to e-mail messages. That rocked.

 

The big problem is when you have coaches who delegate that duty to an assistant who has no clue. Then the coach calls the paper and says "why don't you have our results?"

 

At my last stop, even if every writer in the office and every desker had answered a call when the phone was ringing off the hook, we would have missed people when all the coaches decided they needed to call their scores at the same time. And that's not about lack of staff or not being well-run, there were just so many schools in our coverage area and it happened every Friday night -- for a good 30 minutes, the phone was ringing non-stop with those of us answering phones on the line.

We didn't assume they would call back, either, but many of them did. And chasing scores is just a fact of life.

 

Not anymore, not for me . . . .gloriously.

As for the rest: I never said otherwise.

 

It still is for me, but not in the same way. No immediate deadline, no football and it's not limited to a small geographical area.

Oh man, basketball season's going to be interesting this year.

 

I'm told to write until I finish my story and answer the calls when I'm done. There's no sense in making two pages late while taking a call for a three-inch write-up. When I'm not working on the desk, I take orders from the desk. And if they want me to write until I'm finished, that's what I'm going to do. Sure, if there's no one free to take the call, I'll answer it. But not otherwise until I've filed my 15 inches.

 

This is everything I won't miss about Friday nights whenever I finally leave the business.