South Bend Busy Work

It's Schurz Communications.

 

Yeah, but in the interim stuff like this should make intelligent people sooooo mad.
What a profession we are in. Do publishers/editors whoever came up with this realize what a fucking joke they have made our profession?
If this edict came down at my newspaper they would succeed in getting rid of one employee. I could not do this.
I might throw one together saying. 12-3 p.m. - worked. 4 til 9 - worked. 10 til 1 a.m. - worked.
Then I'd let them fire me.
Please South Bend employees. Show some self respect and do not go along with this.
You can find another job. Life is too precious to be abused like this.

 

Once upon a time, our sports staff had a meeting to discuss certain "suggestions" such as this from management. Conversation quickly devolved into what the heck some of the city side reporters did to fill an eight-hour day: make two phone calls, go to lunch, write a 12-inch story, go home. Meanwhile, we're cranking out like 200 inches of local copy per day in the middle of a busy prep season.

 

Ahh, yes. The typical "all the lazy news-siders leave at 5" bullshit. :

Sorry. I have no sympathy for the narrow minds who think that way. There are lazy people in all departments, but more often than not, those are the exceptions, not the rule.

 

Oh, I agree. It's not all, by any stretch of the imagination.

Last place I worked published a monthly byline count list posted on the board in the break room. SE got pissed because the news-siders got all these weak bylines for rewriting press releases and such, so we in sports starting putting our bylines on everything: phoners, roundups, press releases we'd rewrite, etc. All of a sudden, sports staff bylines soared up the chart.

Shows two can play that game.

 

Didn't I work with you before? You've just made yourself expendable by demonstrating that you've done about 3 hours of work in an 8-hour shift. Next time, at least PRETEND to be doing something constructive (cultivating sources, conducting interviews, researching info for your stories, etc.) while you have your wet dream.

 

At a former shop, we had to fill out a form for a couple of days similiar to this because an 'efficiency specialist' from the corporate office was coming in for a visit and to give a seminar.

The 'efficency specialist' was shocked to learn that the copy editors in our sports department also wrote and took phoners, and designed pages. She questioned our editor why the copy desk wasn't just editing copy. The editor replied, "Because you only allow me four people for a staff."

We never saw the 'efficiency specialist' again.

 

I used to work with the editor whose name is attached to this memo. Yes, she used to be a reporter, and a front-line editor. No, I can't imagine she's looking forward to reading these, nor that she came up with this idea. And she's about as far from "a human piece of dung" as anyone I've met in this business.
I completely agree with your first sentence, though.

 

This may not be the case, here . . . but this will collapse under its own weight and generated ill feeling, and sooner, rather than later.

 

I suspect the South Bend editors will want to do away with this little command once they see how the sports guys actually work. They might have to start paying some of those guys overtime with as much as they might do in a day, especially the ND football and basketball writers.

In the meantime, this is funny shit! We wonder why our business is going in the tank. You have editors sitting around trying to figure out ways to screw with reporters instead of trying to make their product better in order to appeal to a wider variety of advertisers.

 

I would LOVE to see at least one newsroomer in South Bend sac up and make the same request of management.

"Well, you're making twice what I am, therefore you should be doing twice as much work, right?"

Like submit an open records/FOIA request and everything. That would be gold.

 

cry me a river. i'm a lawyer and i have to account for every minute of my workday down to six minute increments.

it's not the end of the world if management wants to make sure its employees are doing what they are purportedly being paid to do.

if anything it gives these people a chance to show how hard they work and show the suits that just because all they produced on tuesday was a 12-inch gamer on podunk high over pissant high, they did a lot more work than that.