Byline Quotas/Counts

[Doc Holliday]

Just wondering, anybody out there work at a shop that requires a minimum number of bylines a day/week? What are they and what do you think of them?

While I get the sentiment that byline requirements "encourage" working, (which all employers want hard working employees) it seems to also say we don't trust or believe you're working.

At the same time it says we don't give a crap about what you're writing or the quality of it, just write something. Not exactly good for morale.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

We had them ..
They lasted a few months and went away.
I never worried about it too much. If you do a good job - solid work - keep on, keeping on. We had some lazy reporters and it provided editors with a reason to ride them for more productivity.
You do your job, stay busy and you won't have to worry about it.

 

[Doc Holliday]

Oh I'm not worried about them. I do my job. Just wondered what others on here thought.

 

[HanSenSE]

ME tried to enforce that in sports at one of my first stops, but sports editor came to the rescue, reminding him we also took info for briefs.

 

[ColdCat]

ME tried to enforce that in sports at one of my first stops, but sports editor came to the rescue, reminding him we also took info for briefs.

I had an SE who was the exact opposite. He would slap his byline on just about any re-written press release but told me when I wrote 40 inches of prep roundup, it had to come with a staff byline. I had the ME on my ass until I explained to her how much exactly I was actually doing on any given day.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

We had a thread on here a couple of years ago after one paper made it a newsroom policy, and the consensus, as I recall, was how stupid and ridiculous it was, because it didn't reflect actually how much work or the quality of it being done.

The idea was to put a byline on every little brief to reach the quota.

 

[RecoveringJournalist]

At my first job, they would post a byline count at the end of the year.

Our lead NFL writer would have the most every year. He worked his ass off and would usually lead everyone by probably 100.

I liked it because it showed how much work the general assignment guys were doing and how little some of the backups on the professional beats were doing. I was always in the top 5 out of a huge staff because I had a few smaller beats that I covered, but I was writing sidebars from every NFL game, a lot of major college games and would help out whenever they would ask. We had backups on major beats who consistently would not have 100 bylines in a year. It was a union ship so nobody every did anything about it.

Posting the list was an effort to shame them and it didn't work.

 

[Doc Holliday]

Wow, 100 stories in a full year and that's it? That's not even one every three days. I'd have gotten fired 15 years ago if I worked like that. What a bunch of lazy POS.

 

[RecoveringJournalist]

Wow, 100 stories in a full year and that's it? That's not even one every three days. I'd have gotten fired 15 years ago if I worked like that. What a bunch of lazy POS.

We had one guy, a backup NFL writer, who over a 3-year period had 86, 97 and 98 bylines. He'd average two bylines a week during the season, one was a game sider and usually a notebook once during the week. He benefited from having two workhorses on the beat and they knew he couldn't do anything right, so they never asked him to do anything. They would send him on the road to write 12 inches, because the time they asked him to write two, he would blow deadline on a 4 p.m. start. It was a joke. He was a piece of garbage. He was an older guy who was just phoning it in until he could retire. He did this for 15-20 years.

 

[Ace]

This is a moot point now. All about web hits.

 

[Doc Holliday]

Wow, 100 stories in a full year and that's it? That's not even one every three days. I'd have gotten fired 15 years ago if I worked like that. What a bunch of lazy POS.

We had one guy, a backup NFL writer, who over a 3-year period had 86, 97 and 98 bylines. He'd average two bylines a week during the season, one was a game sider and usually a notebook once during the week. He benefited from having two workhorses on the beat and they knew he couldn't do anything right, so they never asked him to do anything. They would send him on the road to write 12 inches, because the time they asked him to write two, he would blow deadline on a 4 p.m. start. It was a joke. He was a piece of garbage. He was an older guy who was just phoning it in until he could retire. He did this for 15-20 years.

That is just horrifying. I know unions are tough. But how in the world did this guy not get fired for being a lazy POS?

 

[RecoveringJournalist]

Wow, 100 stories in a full year and that's it? That's not even one every three days. I'd have gotten fired 15 years ago if I worked like that. What a bunch of lazy POS.

We had one guy, a backup NFL writer, who over a 3-year period had 86, 97 and 98 bylines. He'd average two bylines a week during the season, one was a game sider and usually a notebook once during the week. He benefited from having two workhorses on the beat and they knew he couldn't do anything right, so they never asked him to do anything. They would send him on the road to write 12 inches, because the time they asked him to write two, he would blow deadline on a 4 p.m. start. It was a joke. He was a piece of garbage. He was an older guy who was just phoning it in until he could retire. He did this for 15-20 years.

That is just horrifying. I know unions are tough. But how in the world did this guy not get fired for being a lazy POS?

I don't think that paper has ever fired a writer. I know of one person there who resigned before they fired him, but that's it and that was an extreme situation.

When I was there, management was scared ****less of the union. They had to go through so many steps to get someone fired that they were never willing to do it, no matter how much that person deserved to be canned.

 

[Steak Snabler]

We're largely web-based these days, but we have a weekly byline quota and a yearly page-view goal. Raises and promotions are at least in part decided by the latter.

 

[Human_Paraquat]

We had them in a very secretive way at one point, which is to say there was a general number you were expected to hit each month. But that expected number was vague, and the monthly count was never released (though it would occasionally leak out).

When I was doing preps my SE told me to start putting my name on really basic things that should have just been a "staff reports," just to keep my count as high as possible.

My biggest problem with it was they chose not to look at the big picture. When the college football beat writer had by far the most bylines during the season, he wasn't given any extra congratulations. But when that number dipped in the offseason, he'd hear about it.

 

[DeskMonkey1]

I don't know this - or even largely suspect it - but i sometimes wonder if I contributed to my own layoff a few years back by putting "staff reports" on items that I had no business putting my name on. We literally had writers put their byline on "According to Joe Blow on podunkpress.com..." and literally, the only original reporting was the byline and others would put their names on press releases that had very little redone (mainly just light editing).

This happened in print and web. By time I finally gave in and starting stealing others work, it was already too late.

At my current shop, I always put a "posted by deskmonkey1" when I put stuff online unless I'm just putting up a reporter's story.

 

[Rhody31]

They did it for a while at my old place. Basically, they thought the sports guys were slacking off because we were never in the office when everyone else was.
Turns out we had double the byline counts and when you added in photo bylines - which they also counted - our numbers were 4-5 times higher than any news reporter. They also figured who did how many pages of layout each week and saw we were doing as many pages, if not more, than the editors who had one section to do per week.
So after a month or two, they stopped.

 

[Doc Holliday]

^^^

This kind of crap has been going on for decades.

Why can't news editors figure out that sports writers and sports editors work harder than they do?

 

[Batman]

Our ME has been doing them since last summer, but as far as I know they're not tied to anything. They've only been brought up, one way or the other, a couple of times, and it usually hasn't been in a negative way. I think he's just using them to keep tabs on who's staying busy and who isn't.

Now, that said, he has done something in the same vein that makes me want to see him hit by a bus.
Earlier this summer, I came in early on a Saturday. The plan was to do one of our high school football teams' picture day in the morning, write some tab stories for a few hours, then go cover a youth baseball tournament in the afternoon before coming back to put the section out in the evening.
****ty, long, 15-hour day, but it was planned for. I had the day before off and he said OK to it earlier in the week. I wasn't complaining about it. I've done it plenty of times.
I grabbed some lunch on the way back to the office from picture day, and ate while I wrote. I never clocked out since I basically just went through the drive thru. Baseball ended up getting rained out, so I wrote a story on that from a phoner along with three other stories from picture day and still did the section and still worked 15 hours -- without a break. My meal breaks were the drive thru stop I never clocked out for, and eating leftovers at my desk.
ME calls me into the office on Monday and reads me the riot act, accusing me of "wasting his time." Somehow, me working a 15-hour shift with no breaks, in which I wrote four stories and paginated a six-page section was taking advantage of him. Apparently, since the baseball tournament was rained out I didn't still have all of that work to do. In his mind, since I'd told him earlier in the week that it was going to be a 50-hour week based on what there was to do, I was determined to get 50 hours and milk all the overtime I could (for the record, I ended up around 47 hours for the week).
I told him, basically, bull****, and that I could account for every minute of that day without shame.
Big mistake. The next day he created a spreadsheet that I have to fill out with what I do every 10 minutes. This is now part of my daily routine and, ironically, adds about an hour to my total time worked each week.
He said it was going to be part of a larger project to make everyone more efficient, but almost two months later I'm still the only one who has to do it. Even the girl who ****ing fell asleep at her desk three times in the month she's worked here isn't subjected to this.
Every time I have to fill this thing out -- and I know he's not looking at it, but I've had some issues with him recently and I'm afraid to just leave it blank or go over his head with a complaint -- it crushes my soul a little bit more.

 

[DeskMonkey1]

You have the worst luck with MEs, Batman.

I had a former ME one time make everyone detail how much they spent on this and that, but not to the extent you have to do. Anyway, my boss was told flat out that the time he spends slotting out the section doesn't count. Nor did making the schedule, which took about three days when done around his usual day-to-day stuff. And there was something else that he was told didn't count that escapes me now but I remember standing slackjawed when he told us it didn't count.

 

[Doc Holliday]

That is ridiculous. Accounting for every minute is something you'd expect McDonald's or Burger King to do, not a newspaper.