Question for people who are or have been at weeklies

Damn, that ought to be Page 1.
Went through a similar experience this week when my 9-11 column (along with some reader-submitted material) got deep-sixed by the publisher right on deadline when she apparently got freaky about too much gray space (though the reader-submitted stuff was partially her suggestion) and the editor didn't have a chance to move that stuff elsewhere. My column is going to run in our little chain's daily (in which none of my stuff has ever appeared) tomorrow, and we'll try to get it online for my paper.

 

Ok now I'm lost. What the hell happened that was so important in your town that you can't find 600 words for a story this important? I think you need to find a new place to work, that's crazy.

 

The job with the weekly is a second job. My first job is with a daily news organization. That is full time, with benefits.

I wish I didn't have to write for the weekly, but it is something I do to try to help my career.

The featured story this week was an interview related to the city's Sept. 11, 2001 anniversary event. There was also a lot of start of the school year coverage. The city is very schools and children oriented.

Sports coverage is incorporated in the news briefs. I will try to have separate sports portion reinstated next week. It had been that way from 1999 to May 2009.

Paper is 20 tabloid pages. Front page is always a picture. Back page is always an ad. Pages 11-19 are always devoted to advertising.

Circulation is approximately 17,000, all free.

 

I don't think working for this paper will help your career. If you need, the money, that's different.

 

The paper is the first read among many in the community when it comes out Thursday, ahead of the metropolitan daily and specialized publications.

The readers want to know what has been going on with the city government, in the schools and whether their children's names are in the paper for their play from the high school's teams.

I'm trying to go into another profession and essentially all the leaders of the profession read the paper either because they have children who are going to the school, went to the school or they went to the school. My hope is to get a job interview with a person who was quite happy about my coverage, especially within days of the interview. I don't favor anyone in particular, just have some formulas that increase the amount of names, like including everyone who scores at least one point in a basketball game. (We don't and can't have agate.)

This is only a part-time job and publisher wouldn't mind if I got a different part-time job as long as I keep writing for him. Staying on his good side is very important. He is incredibly well-respected and connected.

 

Wow, this sounds like all sorts of horrible in terms of ethics. So to sum up, basically you're keeping this part-time reporting job to curry favor with people you might interview for, and you devised a formula to increase coverage of prominent people?

 

Sounds as if the publisher and OP don't know a thing about news.

 

You, Mr. X are a better man than I. I would be gone from that so fast I'd leave vapor trails. But my opinion might be colored by the strange weekly I am at. We have about 6-7k circulation in the winter and well over 20k in the summer. The paper can be anywhere from two 14 page sections to three 16 page sections depending on the time of year. We have two full time staff photographers, three writers for town news, me soloing sports an assistant editor and a publisher on the editorial side alone. That doesn't include our ad sales staff and our design people. We have made money in each of the past 5 years and continue to have more ads than we can reasonably find space for.

If you see the job at your weekly as a boon to your career, who am I to argue, but it seems to me like a big ole waste of time.

 

Yikes . . . yeah, you aren't even approaching this from the same planet as I do. I retract my advice. When I got to my job I cut the JV coverage so I could add more non-high school stories during the school year (under the theory that there are more people participating in athletics than the high school kids). My job isn't to make the little kiddies and their parent's feel special and unique, its to cover what happens in athletics in my community. You may have missed the point.

 

As mentioned, I don't favor anyone. I just maximize the number of names.

 

To respond to the people who say, "Why do you still work there."

 

What you're engaging in appears to be a community newsletter that happens to be printed on broadsheet (tabloid?), not a weekly newspaper.