Strib byline strike: Does anyone care?

One hard lesson you learn in this business is how, despite the power one gains by having a byline (perception is greater than reality), it all goes away in a flash when our name stops getting printed. Phone calls stop. Our messages, once relayed promptly, go increasingly unreturned in a timely manner and end up never getting returned eventually. We are rendered totally impotent when no one knows who we are, and the unemployed folk here know that's true all too well.

 

How do copy editors and layout people show their solidarity during a byline strike?

BTW, I've found that newspaper sports journalists differ from their newsside counterparts in several ways:

-- They work harder and longer hours;
-- They bitch more about that, and a whole range of other things;
-- They're less likely to file for OT or work-to-rule;
-- They're more likely to skip important union votes or even cross a picket line.

No particular point here. Just observations of newsroom labor dynamics.

 

I had the exact opposite experience in my shop, where the sports department had the highest membership level, provided 100 percent support and routinely told young staffers to file for their overtime or go home.

 

Wow. I've witnessed that over on news side, but never been around a sports department where that happened. Nothing wrong with it -- we all work for money -- but I've just seen sports staffers donate more time for free.

 

Why is that? You probably won't see many on the news side falsifying a time card to cover a special school board meeting or some community water garden committee hearing. Is it because sports is too ingrained into some people's lives and it's hard to separate work from life? I've seen a few guys who work for free and love the job so much that they don't care about it taking over their lives.

 

I think it's just the culture of a particular shop. If you have a couple of senior guys who are pretty vocal about supporting the union and not undercutting your fellow employees, it's pretty easy to develop that culture. It can carry on for decades once it gets started.

Also, I've always considered sports people a little more competitive generally and they usually had a better understanding of the power of working collectively from hearing so many cliches about team work.