Sports copy editor, Trenton, NJ

The Trentonian is looking for a highly motivated and enthusiastic team player to join its sports copy desk. The ideal candidate will have a nose for catching mistakes, strong news judgment and layout expertise. The candidate should be able to work well in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment.

Nights and weekends are required. Recent college graduates will be considered.

Please send your resume and editing/layout examples to:

Aaron Bracy, Sports Editor, The Trentonian, 600 Perry Street, Trenton, NJ 08618

Or e-mail to abracy@trentonian.com.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

 

It's not worth it. He's a lost cause.

 

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that there can be "layout expertise" from "recent college graduates."

This ad should be revised to state: "If you know how to turn a computer on, we will consider you."

 

I beg to differ. I had layout experience when I came out of college.

 

The ad doesn't say layout experience, boots. It says "layout expertise." You had layout expertise as a recent college graduate? I think that's the distinction Sinking Ship was trying to make.

It's comical that this sports editor would be demanding someone with "layout expertise" anyway. He was hired as a sports editor when he had no expertise or even experience as a sports editor, assistant sports editor or boss of any kind. Now he wants a recent college grad to have expertise in layout. There's also an interesting twist to this whole layout topic. The Trentonian is ditching QuarkXPress and Microsoft Word in two weeks in favor of some absurd layout and generic word processing program that was customized for JRC newspapers by some European company. The entire newspaper is going to be produced using this new layout system beginning in two weeks and, as of right now, not one person in the building knows how to use it. So this recent college grad who is a layout expert is going to show up and no one at the Trentonian can even begin to show him what to do.

 

I'm sure it is basically an offshoot of Word and Quark/InDesign.

I doubt any company would develop a totally cockamamie program that had no relation to any existing product.

 

Yeah, how silly of me to think that JRC might be involved in anything cockamamie.

 

It's not JRC, it's the supplier. JRC probably wants a cheaper version of those programs. I'm sure their software provider will give them that.

 

Wanna bet?

 

It's not an offshoot of Word or Quark/In Design. It's something totally, totally different concocted by a German company as a "low-cost" alternative for publishing companies. So please don't make statements about something you don't have any knowledge about.

 

They might as well go to an all-new dime-store software bought off the back of Hans Dickgrubber's truck, since many JRC papers are working with 15-year-old versions of Quark, many of the copies have become corrupted and unstable, they can't get system support since most of the copies are bootlegged/counterfeit in the first place, and due to their fucked-up copy desk clustering operation, pages get passed from one corrupted version of Quark to another, carrying fatal system errors along with them -- and you end up with every pagination machine in the goddamn building bombing five minutes before deadline. (Half the machines, of course, are also 15 years old.)

Then Mr. Publisher is on the phone screeching like a hyena, wondering why you can't make deadline, and threatening to fire everyone in the newsroom if the whole paper isn't out in the next 10 minutes. Of course, they've already laid off everyone in the IT department who knew anything about the machines.