Beware, Trentonian offering jobs that don't exist

When did I say he was a micromanager?

Bob thinks everyone in the sports department sucks, that people are intentionally making mistakes just to piss him off. Why wouldn't he give the new guy carte blanche to make significant changes immediately?

But the point is you don't need to make significant changes at the Trentonian to make it better. Adding a body to the mix to reduce the workload will improve the product. If that body comes with a functioning brain, all the better.

 

I don't want to bicker about whether or not I should or should not criticize Aaron or anyone else. Boots and Frank, I respect your views but I disagree. I'm not going to go back and forth about why we should or should not offer criticism. I'm going to offer criticism or praise when I feel it is right.

I don't want to see anyone fail either. Aaron has proved in the past he is a capable journalist and copy editor. I don't dispute his abilities. I just view this case as one in which he could have relied on his newspaper contacts and good sense to avoid. There were more sensible, and less open to criticism, ways to help his career. No one here is harming him or has the power to unfairly take his job away. It is just some basic criticism. Again, I'd be happy to hear about the positive side of the discussion too, so please post when you think there is a positive.

 

Fair enough. That's why I'm willing to give him time to see what positive things can happen.
Hey as far as the TV thing is concerned, if it makes guys on the desk concentrate on their jobs better, so be it.

 

Fine. And I am equally free to note that I think your interest in him seems a bit peculiar and excessive, and that I wouldn't be especially interested in your evaluation if I were him.

 

To me, the TV issue is just silly. Maybe it was too loud and maybe it was distracting. I don't know. But, it does not make Aaron look good when this is one of two items mentioned about his term so far. I was and remain more curious about Aaron supposedly telling his new employees to step it up. It's hard for me to understand how he has had any more of a chance to get to know his employees than they have had or we have had to get to know him as a sports editor.

Frank, I don't expect Aaron or anyone else to really use this thread for legitimate evaluation. If I was Aaron, I wouldn't listen to me or anyone else on this thread. If I was Aaron, I would be too busy reading the JRC henchman guidebook to have time to read this thread.

 

Really, Bracey himself is almost irrelevant. Maybe he'll do a (comparatively) good job, the section will improve, and then he'll get whacked -- or maybe he won't, and he'll get whacked sooner.

Odds are that on that list of 25 sports editors that they've run through there, maybe 15 were probably fully capable of doing the job too -- if Jelenic and his flunkies would get off their fucking backs.

Jelenic and JRC don't micromanage in the actual sense of the word -- they don't call up every morning with specific recommendations on what the sports editor should do.

What they do is call up almost every morning with screeching fiery bitching about what you did or didn't do last night, why is this story here, you fucking idiot, that headline sucks, who cropped this photo, you fucking idiot, why didn't we get a story on the Vagisil High junior-varsity kickball game, this softball boxscore doesn't add up, you fucking idiot, the golf agate doesn't list the 323rd-place finisher in the Ex-Lax Open, you fucking idiot, I didn't see any transactions from the Hooterville Hockey league, you fucking idiot, I want a preview on high school hockey, you fucking idiot, how come the expanded standings of the UHL and AHL aren't in there, you fucking idiot, I know we cut your section back by two pages and we still want all this shit in there, I don't care if there isn't room, MAKE room, you fucking idiot, no you can't fill your four vacant positions, you fucking idiot, and no we won't authorize overtime, you fucking idiot, anybody who claims overtime, you fire his ass, you fucking idiot, where's the horse racing agate, you fucking idiot...


So whatever Bracey decides to do, he'll be wrong, he'll fail, and he'll be fired. It simply is what it is. This ASE listing mainly looks like he wants somebody else to blame about half this stuff on.

 

I think all of us would like to see a section like the Trentonian improve. It just takes the right person. You've got to give the workers incentive. You've got to massage their ego yet somehow get them to take pride in the product — yet also tell lunatics like Jellenic to take a few steps back and to go count his dollars. Could I have done that? Maybe. Probably. It's what I want to do. I want an army of workers to lead into daily battle. I won't be a henchman, but I would demand accountability. It's not that hard to put out a good section. I do it by myself. I dream of having 5 more workers. You've just gotta get people to care about what they do.

This thread will never die, much like Boots' thread about back-do' plungery.

 

Boots forced this thread to wander off course, but he's done that with other threads. Although he's professed to have worked just about everywhere on the planet (which makes me wonder why he can't keep a job for very long, and if he even works in the field now), I'd bet Boots doesn't even know Bracy or Jelenic and his henchmen.

Bracy isn't the focal point of this; Jelenic's toxic atmosphere is. I wouldn't know Bracy if I fell over him at the driving range, but I don't want to see him fail. We could post all kinds of warm wishes and helpful advice on here, but the problem is that the chips were stacked against him when he took the job, and now he's following the same path as those who preceded him.

Take the thing with the TV. Maybe, in another place, that wouldn't be a big deal. But there's been so much repression that's gone on there (I know two or three of the editors on that list), it's being taken as the first sign the guy's going to plunge into the same booby trap. You can offer all the advice in the world to someone in that position, but the booby traps are still there.

Carry on.

 

Checking out the Trentonian today:

The front page headline is SHOWDOWN OF CHAMPIONS

It's about Trenton's girls basketball team playing in the tournament of champions at the Meadowlands.

I'm sure Aaron didn't build the front page himself but someone in the sports department should have mentioned that no one calls Trenton High School "Trenton Central."

The paper is 48 pages and 18 of it is sports (not even including the poster girl). There are almost no ads in the section so the pages are almost all open pages.

The back page is SLAM DUNK - Rutgers (women) pummels East Carolina in Opening Round of NCAA Tournament.

Now there's an exciting back page, but of course you can understand it because, after all, a high women's seed winning in an expected rout was probably the biggest basketball story of the day.

The only staff written stories are George O'Gorman's page of girls basketball, George's uncredited All-CVC girls basketball team page and Joshua Brett's Athletes of the Week.

Reports of Jay Dunn's departure are greatly exaggerated; he clearly did the Auto Racing page as well as the Philllies page. I'm 95 percent sure he did the other baseball page. If I had to guess I'd say he might have done the Sixers page as well.

The layout of the paper is awful. Probably the best-designed page is 28, the last page of the section -- the horse racing page, or page 44, the Rutgers women page. But they ain't brilliant.

Of course, every page is jammed with about 10-15 inches of copy too many and the entire 18-page section is done by -- at a guess -- a desk of 3 or 4, plus Bracy's contributions (if any).

 

or, he simply wants what every other SE wants, someone to have his back. i like giving JRC what it deserves as much as the next guy, but this cat wanting an assistant doesn't scream "evil" to me by no means.

 

It's not "evil" -- he knows, he's got to know -- that the shitstorm will be coming down on his head very very shortly (if it hasn't already -- command edicts to 'step it up' and to shut off the TV set indicate it already has) and he wants somebody who can absorb at least some of the bullets.

Given the utter certainty that any ASE hired in such a situation would be either next in line to step into the firing line when Bracey inevitably catches a chainsaw in the throat, or else thrown overboard as the protege of the newly-fired scapegoat, you'd have to be nuts to take this job. Absolutely nuts.

Of course the same could be said about the SE job itself.

Adding another paycheck to the payroll a couple weeks after coming onboard sure won't endear Aaron to the Mighty Bobster, either. The idea is to CUT payroll, sonny boy. : :

 

I think the ASE is a pretty decent opportunity for someone.

You could redesign the section and the back page and have some stark BEFORE/AFTER clips to show prospective employers. It is still the richest sports market in the country with 14 major league teams plus the minor league/college/h.s. stuff.