Gannett, Gatehouse talking merger

Not to mention arrival, rental car, hotel check-in, and do it again on Monday.

When I got off the beat, it was generally five stories a day - the early, the notebook/topical other story, the deadline gamer, a writethru of the gamer, and then a lookahead/what came out of postgame availability. Generally, only one of those made the paper. Often you'd be able to lift/plug-in bits from the others, especially for print versions. But it amounted to close to 3,000-plus words per day.

A lot of the suits still think it's 1992 and guys play a round of golf in the morning when the team goes to Arizona, write their one story and get shitfaced in the hotel bar after the game. Pretty much every night on the road, you go to sleep at 1 a.m. or later, wake up at 7 a.m. and pray you haven't be scooped on something, and start all over.

And now Gannett is hiring kids to do that at $40K/annum, which is absurd. Think about it this way: a beat reporter who does 45 days of spring training and all 162 games of the regular season (and there are plenty of guys who do) is at 207 days of work before the playoffs even start. If those are 12-hour days, and most of them will be more, that's 2,484 hours right there. No playoffs, no winter meetings, no travel included - and don't forget, every minute from door to door on a road trip is legally considered work in a lot of states. Fifteen dollars an hour gets you to just under $38K.

 

i know strength coaches and support staff that are at arenas and parks as many hours as writers that are salary. They’re not managers. Players don’t manage anyone either. Not disgareeing with what happened to you, the law doesnt appear to be black and white.

people should be compensated for their hours. Everyone should work at a coffee shop or store or somewhere that you have to keep a clock to learn the rules sometime as teenagers or in college. It amazes me how much shit about labor rules I picked up working at the mall that people around me in journo have no clue about

 

And there will be 500 applicants the next time one of these jobs opens up. I don’t get it.

 

Red flag.

People are using adblockers most of the time because they are so obnoxious.

 

Great post. And like you said the sad part is the suits don't believe it. They don't believe you are working EVEN THOUGH they can see five stories a day magically written for the Website. And like you said, if there was some breaking news (and there always is breaking news on MLB) and you need to start your day at 5 a.m.? That's tough. Pretty tough to stomach at Gannett when after all that work, you get a 2 out of 5 average grade on your review. It's truly despicable. These hard working reporters are donating 30-40 hours a week to the CEOs and also missing important family stuff that news writers take for granted and would never miss. It's Sad.

 

I want to ask this on the topic of the long work days. Not that I disagree with any of the above and - believe me - have plenty of sympathy for what you describe.

Is there a difference between, say, a 12-hour day and a day in which the start time and end time are 12 hours apart?

From my own experience at a p.m. daily long ago, there were innumerable split shifts - by choice and by necessity. When I later worked at a major metro a.m. paper when online demands were ramping up, I understood that the time demands on a beat reporter really did range from morning to midnight. But did every hour during that range necessarily have to be spent working?

For example, if a reporter was supposed to have an aggregation post by 10 a.m. - could that be done and then some hours not working take place (until the scheduled interview for the feature story or until practice)? I guess what I'm saying is, can/could reporters "turn off" the meter at some point between the start of the work day and the end of the work day?

I acknowledge that kind of sucks ... working < 12 hours even though the day started and ended 12 hours apart ... but is there anything to that?

 

Basically all news organizations are web first now and in search of page views. What this means is your "beat" reporters are working 24/7. Yes, news breaks on MLB, NFL, college, MLS, NHL all hours of the day/night. And on every day of the week. Reporters are terrorized if they get "beat" on a story. There is no rest. You could be driving to your daughter's recital and boom ... you must stop and work. You could be boarding an airplane and boom, you better purchase internet on the flight because some news just broke and you, only you, are required to post it. So yes, you might get an hour or two during the day here or there while waiting for the news conference to start, but you are working seven days a week, on call all day/night. And for that y9u get a 2 out of 5 grade by your gannett superior on your evaluation.

 

My adblocker currently shows 1.3 million blocked. Best thing ever.

 

I don't mind the in-page banner-style ads. Folks have to make a tiny bit of money somehow. The popups and the takeovers are the ones that annoy the crap out of me. That and auto-play video.

 

Auto-play video is what made me install an ad blocker. Nothing worse than reading through a site when you've left your volume up and nearly jump out of your skin when your computer starts screaming at you about some car dealership.

Well, I guess there is something worse, now that I think about it: when that same auto-play video causes the browser to crash.

 

Several years ago when I was the web guy for our sports department, we installed newspaper-wide video players that were supposed to be set to auto-play. I got so pissed off at them that I turned the sports player off. It took about a week, but one of the suits, apologetic because he didn't like them either, told me I had to turn auto-play back on.

 

CNN and the Go/Media sites both have made me consider installing an ad blocker again. I had one going in my 20s, when I pirated a bunch of other shit anyway, but I gained some conscience as I got older and realized these sites -do- need a viable stream of revenue. But so many sites are just designed as an intentional "FU" to the user experience.