Travel cutbacks?

[spnited]

Congratulations, Micke. You will not be laid off in the next round of cuts.
Instead, we will allow you to stay on staff as long as you work for free and pay your own expenses on the road, since you seem so willing to do so.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

Not to be a ****, but if you thought you owed it to your readers you're a fool.

If you wanted to cover it and this was the only way you could, that's still bad, but not as.

 

[Joe Williams]

I always felt bad for the adults who grew up as orphans and became sportswriters. They never had family anywhere to stay with for free and therefore lost out all sorts of plum assignments to lesser journalists with more relatives.

 

[hankschu]

Now if my paper asked me to use accrued points for hotel rooms, I would do that. For the most part, all of my Marriott points were picked up on company trips that the company paid for. They're well within their rights to ask for you to use those points for rooms. But that's about the extent of it. I am completely unwilling to travel someplace on a company assignment without being compensated. No free rides. I get paid too little to bend over backwards for someone who won't do the same for me.

I have to quibble with the Marriott part of that post. We do not get compensated nearly enough for our time when we are home, much less when we travel. Some years back, Congress agreed. There was a lot of noise, as I recall, from companies wanting to take points from employees. Congress said, "Fine, if you do that we're going to start taxing them as income." Companies backed off.

Fortunately, my company agrees. Once, I offered to "sell" some of my points at a discount to help us save some money in a particular city where hotel rates were through the roof. My boss said no, just pay for the hotel as usual, because the company does not want to get involved in employees' points.

 

[hankschu]

One of the six inductees last summer in the Pro Football Hall of Fame was one I covered since his high school days. i asked my boss right after the HOF class was announced in February to file back the weekend of Aug. 3-5 in Canton and see if, by that time, our travel expenses could be taken care of. he said "we'll have to see, but i doubt it very seriously because we're trying to cut back as much as possible."
long story made short here: because of the obvious significance of this honor (there's only like 260 inductees in the entire history of Pro HOF), i was hell-bent to cover it. so rather than keep getting put on hold or getting the "bad news budget" word, I took a week's vacation and went to Canton.
call me either a dumbass or the most loyal SOB scribe in the world, but i paid for the entire trip. all of it. and get this and everybody out there reading it will surely respond, "you have to be crazy": i filed 8-to-10 stories from Canton on the whole deal. features, notebooks, the works and had stuff on our guy nobody else did, what with our experience in covering him.
as i have noted elsewhere in some of these threads, i am one of those dudes who lives,breathes and practically sleeps my sportswriting gig and will go out of the way and far beyond the call of duty (and sanity) sometimes to get somthing done. i felt, and believed, i owed it to our readers to have a local writer there to cover this huge honor.

Micke, I don't think you're a dumbass, but I'd like to offer this advice: Never care more about your product than your bosses do. It can only lead to heartache.

 

[SixToe]

You're crazy paying for that HOF trip.

hankschu is right. Never care more about the product than your bosses or you'll get screwed to the mat.

How many readers thanked you for doing that out of your pocket? Did your editor? Sports editor? The publisher?

 

[Joe Williams]

Here's where I figure the hotel points and the airline miles come into play:

A journalist who gets sent on a week-long road assignment is gone from his home 120 hours (5 x 24 hours) and gets paid for 40 hours.

A journalist who logs five office shifts that same week is gone from his home 40 hours and gets paid for 40 hours. Even allowing for hellacious commuting, it's 50-60 hours gone, max.

So a few thousand hotel points and airline miles -- none of it out of the company's pocket -- seems like a pretty slick way for an employer to get those extra 60 or 70 hours out of you. And you want to give them back?

 

[Mizzougrad96]

Never use your own money to cover an event.
Never use your hotel points to cover an event.
Never use your airplane miles to cover an event.

Staying with family while covering an event is a little different, but if you do it, do it because you'd rather be there than a hotel.

Don't love your newspaper because it won't love you back.

 

[Cosmo]

Joe, I can see both sides.

For the most part, I wouldn't get those hotel points unless I was sent on assignment by the company.

But you're right. Time away from home should be compensated somehow, and it sure isn't compensated in paid hours.

 

[zagoshe]

To me, the silliest part of all of this is -- you can cut an entire travel budget out down to the last penny and it isn't a drop in the bucket towards the problems papers face these days.

I mean, I hope nobody ever loses a job, I want everyone to work, but given that travel is a big part of putting out a quality section and remaining competitive -- and in many ways it is what seperates us from bloggers -- if I were told to choose between losing my travel budget or one employee -- I'd have to lose the employee.

And losing one employee in terms of what that saves a company when you consider salary, benefits, etc. -- is worth two or three or four times what the travel budget is at most places.

Cutting travel back to ridiculous levels (I understand you can trim some luxury trips -- like covering the Master's or some of the all star games you have no players involved with) is exactly the kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face decisions which have brought this industry to the ground.

We are all working for AP clipping services with local ads.....

 

[Rhody31]

When I did overnights, I had to put the hotel on my card and company reimbursed me afterward. In my mind, any points accrued would be mine.

But if you use a company card to for hotels, airfare, etc., wouldn't those points belong to the company? They did pay for them ...

 

[Mizzougrad96]

When I did overnights, I had to put the hotel on my card and company reimbursed me afterward. In my mind, any points accrued would be mine.

But if you use a company card to for hotels, airfare, etc., wouldn't those points belong to the company? They did pay for them ...

There's a reason why hotel companies and airlines will not let corporations get points or miles. If you get them, whether it's for work or pleasure, they're yours.

Traveling is a pain in the ass. It's one of the few perks.

 

[SoCalDude]

We have been talking about this "doing it on your own" for as long as I can remember.
At one time, me and another guy covered the two D-I colleges in town. He was doing extra **** on his own that I didn't want to do. It made me look bad, which I wasn't overly concerned about because I knew I was doing as good a job as time allowed. But I told him that the **** he was doing, the next guy on his beat might not want to do. He was setting a bad precedent.

 

[Joe Williams]

When I did overnights, I had to put the hotel on my card and company reimbursed me afterward. In my mind, any points accrued would be mine.

But if you use a company card to for hotels, airfare, etc., wouldn't those points belong to the company? They did pay for them ...

There's a reason why hotel companies and airlines will not let corporations get points or miles. If you get them, whether it's for work or pleasure, they're yours.

Traveling is a pain in the ass. It's one of the few perks.

The reason is, they don't want to cannibalize their most lucrative business -- that next work-related trip.

But an office worker who wants my miles, or wants me to flip them to the company, can put his butt in 24E for a five-hour (plus 90 minutes delay getting off the ground to begin with) sweatshop flight filled with Grandma and Grandpa and a hundred screaming kids and all sorts of smelly food and people and jammed overhead space. All before, during or after I begin my actual "work day."

 

[jlee]

I think what micke did was crazy and could set a bad precedent, but it's an exception that had to be made. How many times does a hometown guy go into the Pro HOF? Micke saw a great story and wrote it; I can't fault him/her for that. I wish micke the best in writing for some better shop (or a shop at all) while I'm back in grad school or bussing tables.

 

[SixToe]

How many times does a hometown guy go into the Pro HOF?

Sorry. Doesn't matter.

If the company won't pay for it, you don't pay for it out of your own pocket for the goodness of the company or any loyalty to readers. They don't give a **** about you.

The only way I would do the trip out of pocket is if I could freelance something for another publication and write it all off. Even then I don't believe I would give the newspaper much. It's a terrible precedent.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

I think what micke did was crazy and could set a bad precedent, but it's an exception that had to be made. How many times does a hometown guy go into the Pro HOF? Micke saw a great story and wrote it; I can't fault him/her for that. I wish micke the best in writing for some better shop (or a shop at all) while I'm back in grad school or bussing tables.

There is no reason he would have to go to Canton to write that story. He wanted to go. If you pay your own way to cover an event, you're a glorified fanboy. If he was straight out of school, I think you could say he didn't know any better, but I get the sense that's not the case with him.

 

[SixToe]

I know a fanboi who covers auto racing. He pays his own way, bought some of his own work equipment and is giddy at the thought of being around all the drivers.

 

[MoeLarryCurly]

I cover a Univ. home and away and expect to be told there will be no travel this upcoming season. However I thought the same thing this past season and ended up going on the road during the football season. For the time being I am going about the usual off-season duties as if I will be doing it again in the fall.

They do a fine job of selling the coverage to advertisers, so I would think as long as that keeps up, they will keep the travel. Though the SE at our place is spineless and won't fight for anything, and is very, very clueless on how to work a toaster let alone a department and the upper management is rather wishy-washy/flip flop so anything is possible.

I prepare for the worst, expect the least and anything different from that is a bonus in my eyes anymore.

I could totally see plans to cover the team on the road again only to be told at the last minute that travel plans are being scrapped. That's how our operation is run.

 

[spud]

When the higher ups see my travel expenses next week they're gonna **** a brick. Might as well take it while they're dolling it out though, yeah?