Annual byline count?

That's about where I'm at numbers wise as well. I have a reporter that covers most of our sports so I'm pretty much writing everything except sports, though that will change with the football season. And I'm stockpiling stuff for next week when I'll be gone most of the week. We're a weekly, if a story goes on the web before coming out in the paper I'll usually extend that into the story running in the paper.

 

Well tell them that you need a number to hit, otherwise, how will you know if you are doing what they want?

 

From Office Space:

You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?

 

Never counted but guessing between 200-250. Section's getting 2-3 pages per day, non-Sunday daily.

 

250 range at a 50-50 writing/pagination gig.

 

That's precisely what I did when they started counting bylines in my shop (it was to set up a coworker perceived to be lazy). At the end of EVERY briefs section, there was a byline.

 

They used to post our byline count at one of my stops. I had 600+ one year when I was covering baseball with almost no help.

 

I figured this out recently when I was asked to give myself an annual review. I checked the folders on my personal and work laptops and came up with something in the neighborhood of 12 full stories a week, which would land me around the high 500s to low 600s annually. FWIW, I cover nearly 20 high schools, a college, some semi-pro stuff and just about anything else with local ties (and there's a lot of it), so there were many of 4- and 5-story days sprinkled in between August and May. I'm not perfect at my job, but nobody has ever accused me of being lazy.

 

Precisely. Let's say you do a feature or enterprise, interview a bunch of people and put a lot of time into writing the story. One byline. Then you interview one or two people for a simple news story. One byline. Byline counts are overrated.

I average about 300 a year, not counting blog posts.

 

I try to average more than one story per day. My beat is the preps, but there are so many stories out there.

 

I've gotten into the habit of sending to my personal Yahoo email every bylined story I write (We have a shitty work email system that is good for crashing for extended periods of time every two or three months).

This makes it easy to count my bylined stories and, in the last 12 months, I've written 324 of them. That doesn't include the fact that I've probably shot a good 200 of them myself and have laid out three 2-5 page sections every week (So 156 total sections) and maybe five special sections.

Point is, byline counts are really hard to judge. If you're counting stories only, I'm at 324. If you're counting individual photo assignments, it's probably 524. If you're adding layout in (Just to get an idea of how much work one person is doing), my number is something like 780.

I'm not the hardest working person in the world but I can GUARANTEE you my sports coworker and I would be heads, shoulders, knees and toes above everyone else in the company. Easily. It's just the nature of sports.

 

And this is the argument schieza and I constantly get into. He sometimes doesn't understand questions that are patently clear.
When you're asked "what was your byline count" it doesn't count photos or anything else. If you were asked "what was your byline count and photo credits?" then it'd be different.