Question about staffing

two. and be lucky they don't cut one.

 

So what do you all think about trying to do this with eight designers, two readers and one guy whose job is to pull wire copy?

 

It can be done, as long as the designers have some copy-editing skills.

 

I for one hope someone creates the username "posting" to have a flame war with "lurking"

 

Oh no, designers build pages. The readers read. It's great fun on draft day.

 

Then the designers need to step up a little.

 

At the time of the crash last night I tried to post this. In the last year or so we've merged our production operations with our parent paper, so they do the bulk of the pagination and editing of wire copy for us now, while we do the layout and edit the staff-produced copy

However, before the merger and after staff cutbacks, this is what would happen for a 12-16 page Sunday section:
1 person layout/paginate the "advance" columns and stories on Friday night (this would be the one page of the weekly bowling, tennis, and outdoors columns; the weekly NFL column at the top of one page; the weekly baseball column on the top of another page; and if there was a Sunday feature to serve as the page 1 anchor, he would design that too).
Then on Sunday, the lineup would be:
- 1 person in slot (doing the layout - a different person than Friday night; and editing copy)
- 2 copy editors (who would also paginate... usually a 70-30 split as one of the copy editors would also be putting together all the agate)...sometimes if staffing permitted it, 3 copy editors (one who would strictly edit copy and do agate; 2 who would paginate the section (50-50 split of pages) and edit copy.


Before the staff cutbacks (we're going back a few years now)
1 person layout/paginate the "advance" columns and stories on Friday night (this would be the one page of the weekly bowling, tennis, and outdoors columns; the weekly NFL column at the top of one page; the weekly baseball column on the top of another page; and if there was a Sunday feature to serve as the page 1 anchor, he would design that too).

Then on Sunday, the lineup would be:
- 1 person in slot (doing the layout - a different person than Friday night; and editing copy)
- 3 copy editors (one who would strictly edit copy, 2 who would split time between editing copy and paginating (50-50 split of pages)
- 1 part-time writer doing agate



That's at 70K daily, that at the time had three editions per night, heavy focus on local (high school/college) sports, staffed Philadelphia pro sports, relied on sister paper for stories on NY/NJ pro sports.

 

Depends. What are the expectations for quality? How busy of a sports town is it (big difference between staffing one MLB team and staffing two)? If the paper pays for highly skilled talent, you might be able to get by with fewer bodies. How versatile are the staffers? Is the design complex and time-consuming or relatively uncluttered and simple? What is the emphasis -- if you stress accuracy, you'll need more people; if the emphasis is on sizzle, maybe a bit less. What are the deadlines? How extensive are the replates? Do you want to keep people longterm or burn them out and continually replace them? If it's a veteran staff, there will be more vacation time involved. Lots of things to consider, not one catch-all answer.

 

What Frank said.

 

Right now we'll have a 10- or 12-page Sunday section with essentially 3 or 4 people: slot, agate guy plus she/he does another page, and the third guy designing AND copyediting his 2 or 3 pages. A fourth person who answers phones helps edit copy when he has time. We're an APSE section, for what that's worth in terms of helping define our quality. Usually a Sunday page is done in advance, but not always.