Miami Herald moving out of Doral offices...

Working from home while stringing, sometimes I miss the low roar of the police/fire scanner in the background. One stop, since we had a few folks in the newsroom at night, we'd take guesses at what the fire dept. would find when they arrived on scene. One of the legends of the paper was the time someone called in a fire report because he wasn't invited to the neighbors' barbecue.

 

At my last stop for swimming, the entire league went to computerized timing. Coaches would send me pdfs of the result sheets and I'd knock out the agate and the brief in about 15 minutes, varsity boys and girls.

 

All the nostalgia in the thread shows once again how "newspapering" gets in the blood of journalists. The Mike Royko stories in his book of going drinking after work; the nostalgia here about taking phone calls; the one person who always complains the newsroom is "too loud." This is why I get so upset at the suits/hedge fund owner types. They have no concern over the ruination of a once-proud business. They've forced out so many reporters who had writing/editing/newspapering in their blood. And most of the shops got rid of their presses and are printing elsewhere, removing those presswomen and men who also had newspaperin' in their blood. This is why Fredrick gets so upset about the suits. They ruined a good industry without even consulting those who could have saved the business -- those who care about the product. Not suits and their consultants. Consultants?? Anybody have any consultant stories? LOL.

 

At our PGA stop one year, the SE decided to run replicas of the top 3 scorecards each day. We would send back the hole-by-hole scores and the desk would create the scorecards. To make it more realistic, they had different people hand write the scores on the card. All was well until the third day when somebody transposed a couple of numbers on, say, holes 9 and 10 for the leader. We got back to the course the next day to a shitstorm of people calling the tournament office thinking what we ran was the actual scorecard and why wasn't the guy disqualified for turning in an incorrect card. At least we knew people were reading our stuff .....

 

Next day's correction should have simply said, "What I stupid I am!"
[/robertodivicenzo]

 

At my last shop, it was $100,000 annually to lease about a third of a floor in a bank building downtown plus paying for the phone system and cable/internet.
It had space for roughly 25 people along with a conference room, breakroom and morgue.
At the end, three people worked out of full-time with four there part-time.
I suspect that over-leveraged newspaper companies are going to ditch office space en masse because it will result in a ton of savings by passing those costs on to employees, but those same employees will save a ton of money by cutting down/ending commutes and not having to pay for parking.
The downside is that work from home is fine for experienced employees but I don't see how it will go for new hires with no or little experience.

 

Very true.

Over the past three months, our copy desk/design crew has been working from home. One of my coworkers started last summer with no newspaper experience, but well-versed in the design aspect, programs, etc.

When you're actually in the same room, you can give constructive criticism and suggestions earlier in the page-building process ... working remotely, it's much tougher. It's almost like he hasn't had any guidance or training for the past three months.

 

Another thing to consider is CMS and design software. Working from home is fine for reporters or non-designers but even copy editing with multiple monitors is easier at office. Design is easier with big screens rather than laptop. When I was at Gannett sometimes the CMS Presto was hard to load from home. While sometimes say for reporters it isn't necessary to work from the office, for many others working from home makes the job much more difficult.

I will also echo what others said about camaraderie in the office being missed. It was nice to bounce ideas off others in person and just talking with other reporters about stories and coverage.

 

That's why you purchase that extra monitor or two and expense the company. The Herald certainly has the budget, especially if they want their workforce to continue being productive, even at home.

 

Cleaned out my cubicle last week and brought the computer tower and two monitors home.

I upgraded to a faster internet a couple of weeks ago (ostensibly from 100 Mbps to 200) and found my 2007 iMac was showing no speed improvement (typically between 87-94 Mbps). I hooked up my company Dell tower and immediately got 146 Mbps. Curious what kind of speed I might get on a new iMac, but its Catalina operating system doesn't run 32-bit apps, such as the Image and Graphics droplets we use to move images into our system. So if I do get a newer Mac, it'll have to be a refurbished one running Mojave.

 

Not to rub it in - seriously - but I left McClatchy five months ago for a twice-weekly in Auburn, about 25 miles east of Sacramento (and 15 minutes from Tahoe). I spent the last month of my third go-round with Sac in my dining room with two big desktops after being transferred to the publishing center and taking a 40-percent pay cut. Small consolation: I got to know every TV commercial jingle by heart.

I started in Auburn the day after the Super Bowl and have made the drive up I-80 each weekday since. It's a four-person newsroom - small, to be sure, but the Journal building in downtown is big, is considered historic, and it's all ours. And it has that buzz. We meet. We plan. We talk. We laugh. We update. We help each other. We gather around one computer to look at art and discuss news releases and emails. We communicate. Our little team is driven, and morale is great. And it all happens in the newsroom.

I haven't had this much genuine fun in a long time.

 

You filled out some of the Google documents I went by.