Rise of the one-man band

Taking from the Biloxi thread on Anything Goes and news from other places, it sounds as if there's a push by mid-sized papers, those with sports staffs of at least 8-10 a decade ago, to go down to a one-person sports operation. For those of you caught in that situation (or lucky enough to still be employed in such a situation), how do you manage things? What do you prioritize? And do you ever get a day off?

 

It is god awful. You get to what you can, say "fuck it" to the stuff you can't, and try to keep your sanity as best as you can. The first time I did it was for about nine months, and I had a pretty decent crew of stringers to help mitigate a lot of it. We ended up with more game coverage on Fridays during football season than we had when it had been a two-man department. I still had to do all the layout, and only a couple of the stringers wanted to do features or advances, so I wound up running around like crazy to take on that. Sometimes I would get a day off. If I was lucky. Then the freelancing budget got slashed, and I was doing everything myself for about a month, until the publisher decided to cut local sports coverage entirely and I was gone too.
The second time around was at a place where everything was through a central design hub, so I would just pick one game to cover and shoot photos, make sure my gamers and pics were in the system before the paginators got around to it, and type up the rest of the games for a roundup. I actually did take a vacation, picking a week early in the basketball season when things were quiet and we could have a few features in the can and a news-sider could swing by a game a few times that week for standalone art with the final score in the cutline.
Both times I was looking for the exit door, so any publisher that tries this trick better be prepared to lose the one person they were trying to keep.
You find ways to survive. You look for one game that is the big game that night and cover that. You try to spread the coverage around so you're hitting as many schools as you can. You get angry emails and voicemails because you didn't pick their school that night, and you just try to brush it off. Mostly, you keep your clippings fresh and your resume up to date.

 

Amazing to think one person can get the work done without working 120 hours a week. As long as there is actual newsprint that needs to have words and pictures on it, it's an operation that needs at least 3 bodies to function IMO. If it's all online, fine, let one person have at it.

 

Been doing it for about 18 months, design, photos and writing. Was crushing me until I learned to say no. Above posters are correct, you try and pick one game a night, cover it, try to get a decent follow or feature out of it so you have something in the can for the next day or a rainy day. We only publish five days a week, so I'm always off Sundays and try to pick a night during the week to cut out early to make up for working on Saturdays.
I was told I'm have an unlimited budget for stringers when my part-timer left and was not replaced, but unfortunately unlimited means about 50 bucks a week. Also, the thing about stringers is, if they don't want to work until 11 p.m. on a Friday covering a football game, they don't.

 

It's amazing that the suits are so clueless we're at this point: where newspapers are going with one person sports staffs. I would think the only way to combat this would be to actually work 40 hours a week instead of 84 hours a week and getting paid for 40. If the one-person staff would walk out after hitting 40, the suits would have to do "something." Even if it forced them to kill the print product, that'd be progress.

 

ColdCat and bumpy, sounds brutal. At my 15K shop, we have cut sports back from a three-man to tw0-man operation, with a news desker (me!) doing sports pages/upload on Monday night and pitching in occasionally with game coverage.

@ColdCat, I was curious about this: " ... until the publisher decided to cut local sports coverage entirely and I was gone too."

How big of a paper were you at when this happened? I'd like to think we wouldn't completely cut sports/local sports coverage, but who knows?

 

I was a one-man band for a month when we were in-between ASEs at our two-person shop.

It was the longest month of my life. Felt like 60 days. I had one Sunday off and pulled 80-hour weeks every week. We were publishing 6 days/week at the time, too, and had to do our own pagination. The newspaper has been on a hiring freeze and the current SE is a one-man band, but at least has a decent stringer budget.

 

8K 6-day. This would have been 6 years ago.

The publisher told the ME that they could handle all local sports coverage through freelancers, but gave them a freelancing budget of $100/month.

That lasted for a few months until someone got around to telling the publisher what an idiot he was and they hired back the SE spot. That publisher is long gone and I've heard the sports department is back up to two people now.

 

As a one-man band, I have two conflicting thoughts on this:

1. You have to pick your spots. I can’t be at everything and I don’t pretend I can. I’ve been surprised how understanding parents and coaches have been. It does set them up to be excited when I do come.

2. In my experience, the people who are most likely to complain don’t care how good a story is or even how long. They only care that it exists. So, not every story has to be remotely good. Save your sanity for the genuine good stories that do come along, then just make sure the Bumblefuck Bumblebees get a headline for grandma and grandpa to clip out.

 

It's incredible how much you can fool readers into thinking you're giving more coverage by using headlines and breaking round-ups into small stories with photos. It made me feel a little dirty doing it, but after 10 years as a one-man band operation, my sanity required smoke and mirrors the final couple years.

 

I did a lot of the above when I was the sports guy (and one of the two regular writers) at my weekly paper for several years.
Sure, it was a weekly, so there were fewer headaches when it came to deadline stuff, but we covered eight schools, six of which had football, with two of the football schools being in town. I was lucky enough to have a stringer for a couple years, which helped with getting both in-town football teams covered and with other stuff.
After that budget went away, I got lucky again for a few years with a couple area amateur photographers who were really good and got me great pics from their kids' schools.
But I'd have to keep reminding the powers that be that I couldn't be everywhere, even for the in-town schools.

 

I once turned down a one-man shop job despite living in my childhood bedroom after college at the time. Figured it was a great way to burn out and end my journalism career early.