Who's your elephant in your newsroom?

Who is the person at newspaper/station/web group who absolutely doesn't pull their weight? How do they slack? Negative attitude? Sheer laziness? Poor work? Let's see how long this list is.

 

Times like this, I wish I hadn't previously outed myself ...

 

We have a desk person who regularly edits errors INTO stories and falls asleep in their chair in the middle of shifts.

We have a writer who basically refuses to do any work, yet he's not in danger of being fired.

 

Everybody at my current shop kicks ass as far as work ethic and the high level of work they produce.

At a previous stop, however, there was this designer/copy editor (white male, since this is an offshoot of the minority thread), who worked while high, rarely worked more than 30 hours a week (but was paid for 40), had a tendency to call in sick on what was supposed to be his first day back after a vacation, not to mention his numerous long smoke breaks and a relatively high error rate in heds and cutlines.

He later left the shop to take another job, failed the drug screening for his new job and my old stop declined to rehire him (and instituted drug testing). He might be out of journalism at the moment.

 

I thought this thread was about Republicans in the newsroom. ;D

 

Taking cue from the other thread, it is really tough to fire people. I remember when I was growing up, getting fired was a reality. It could happen at any moment, so you worked your ass off.
Not the case anymore. Most places, you get several warnings. So many, that you're almost guaranteed six months minimum employement before they give a realistic thought to firing you.

 

Well, at where I'm doing a summer internship now, the elephant is definitely, oddly enough, my editor. I'm not to keen on the sports department because I'm not doing sports (someone shoot me). But consensus is that it's my editor.

 

Huh?

 

Has worked in the business for 5 years but only seems to know football, basketball and track. Has seemingly no ambition to improve. Only writes stories, does no layout like the other 3 on staff. Makes the same mistakes over and over again. Has terrible rapport with local coaches (probably due to making some big time errors in his gamers). After 10 months on the job, has written one column (and it was assigned) and has done zero enterprise stories.

There will be a jobs posting in the next 2 weeks.

 

I seriously believe we worked with the same guy, albeit a few years apart.

 

We got two. One guy comes in when ever he wants, the other (SE) covers for him. Together, they are worth about half (in terms of contribution) as the lowest person (copy guy) in the newsroom.

 

Stupid, how does he get out of doing layout? It would seem like the SE or ASE would assign that.