Beware, Trentonian offering jobs that don't exist

I know where I work at a JRC paper, deadline is pretty strict. We definitely hear about it if the paper isn't done pretty close to deadline.

 

I wasn't suggesting alleged extreme deadline failure is SOP for JRC pubs. I just suggested that attempting to explain any JRC decision, issue, problem, etc. with good sense, reason or ration is not possible.

 

Angola, here's what I can't get past.

Any time it's deemed necessary to get something in the paper, the bigwigs change the rules, a one-night-only special dispensation which we should not get used to because deadlines are, you know, DEADLINES.

And if we get in 45 minutes late to make the late World Series game, everything seems to still run smoothly and my paper's still in my driveway at 6 a.m.

Now, I still have those recurring nightmares about being 20 minutes past deadline with no end in sight. But in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't. Because it seems like they aren't all THAT important.

 

Is it good policy to write a column for one newspaper and then use almost the exact same line from that column in a column you are writing one month later for a different newspaper?

http://www.trentonian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18135526&BRD=1697&PAG=461&dept_id=178120&rfi=6

And a month earlier...

http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007702230399

He even capitalized "WITH" in both sentences.

 

Nice. This is ethically wrong, but I've never considered something like that plagiarism, per se. You can't really plagiarize yourself, can you? If you can, a lot of columnists would be out of jobs.

 

Not plagurism. Just lazy. And I know I've had go-to phrases that I use more than once in a year or so, and there's a chance I've even had the same sentence or allegory or whatever over the course of a few years. But within a month? Dirty pool.

 

Threadjack alert....a couple of years ago, the dance critic for the Miami Herald got canned for recycling some stuff he wrote when he was the dance critic for the San Francisco Chronicle...a couple of descriptive phrases. Paper looked kind of shitty for doing it, but on the other hand, they recruited the guy and gave him a raise to come to Miami. It ain't like you're doing a hell of a lot of writing on deadline, the least you can do for a new employer is come up with a new way of describing Twyla Tharp.

 

Yes you can. If you are an actual employee of a newspaper, anything and everything you write for that newspaper is their property in terms of copyright, and if you move on to another employer, you cannot reuse, in whole or in part, anything you wrote for the previous paper without their permission. You can write similar stories on similar topics -- ideas cannot be copyrighted -- but you have to write it all over again from scratch.

(It gets a little dicier for stringers -- i.e. 'independent contractors,' who retain the copyright on their own work, other than granting "first publication rights," but more and more publications are requiring stringers sign releases granting "unlimited rights" to the work, which gives the paper complete copyright control.)

Back to Bracy, I doubt very much any court would find plagiarism in the use of one sentence, but if I were the Courier-Post, I would run his columns through the anti-plagiarism search engines to see if he's lifting more than a sentence at a time from his previous stuff. And if he is, sue his employer, which is legally responsible for his actions.

Most employers which care anything about journalistic ethics and integrity impress upon their staff the importance of avoiding plagiarism.

 

This is crazy. Anyone who has spent a good chunk of time editing sports writers knows even the best ones tend to repeat themselves. I've heard them go on radio or TV and virtually quote themselves. It isn't intentional, they just fall in love with a word, a phrase, a sentence, an idea, and they use it until they finally get sick of it. It happens all the time to the point that any good copy editor could easily write a parody of just about any writer they edit regularly.

In all seriousness, I think the turn this thread has taken is sick. It is human to bear scars from working for a place like JRC, but at some point, we and we alone have the responsibility to not let bad experiences in the business turn us into bad human beings. If you are so embittered by your brush with Mr. Evil that you have to fixate on repeatedly ripping into someone who is new in his job, in all sincerity I recommend that you get some psychological help so you can move past it.

 

Well said, Frank.

 

Oh bullshit. This thread is not focused on Aaron Bracy. What he does at the Trentonian is pretty much irrelevant, both to the thread and to the larger world of journalism.

Bracy, I suppose, could have earned kudos and thunderous applause if he came in, revitalized and rejuveneated the Trentonian sports section, inspired the writers to put out stories with sizzle, the deskers to turn out tight, snappy, eye-catching pages, improved staff performance and employee morale, given staffers positive incentives to produce their best work ever, tried to lead through encouragement and energy rather than the hammer, the whip, and the loaded gun, but had he tried any of that, he wouldn't have lasted one week, not the six the unofficial over/under was set at upon his arrival. JRC isn't interested in any of that shit. In fact, it's the LAST thing they want.

Bracy is not parachuting in from Puyallup, Washington -- he knew what he was getting into. He knew what the vampires, cannibals and meat-eating animals who run JRC want -- to attack and decimate the staff. Assuming the reports of the "step it up" warning and the "turn off the TV" edict to be reasonably reliable, his first moves were to mark the territory, pissing all over the place to prove who's boss. Whether he's plagiarizing or not, or writing good columns or not, I don't know or care, and certainly the flesh-eating zombies who run JRC could not possibly give a flaming fuck less. He is there for a reason: as a surrogate for the JRC bastards to destroy people, run staff out of there and slash the payroll.

See, JRC certainly has no compunction to do it themselves if they have to -- to fire people without warning, to lay off staff with little rhyme or reason but to cut payroll -- they've done it hundreds of times before, they can do it hundreds of times again. But what they really would like is for employees to quit of their own volition: to pack up their shit and get out. When employees quit, there's no bullshit about unemployment claims, vacation, sick leave, severance pay, health care, none of that shit. You quit, fine: Get out. It's Jelenic's wet dream. So they make it their mission in life, to make it unmistakably clear to every employee in their chain, that they would just be wonderfully happy if you would do them a fucking favor and quit. Bracy is simply a very minor cog in that process.

Depending how the cards fall (that is, what kind of mood Bob wakes up in, on any given morning), Bracy may be the one who gets destroyed first, but rest assured, others will go too. If deadline is being blown by hours every night, thousands of copies being returned, you can bet your sweet bippy SOMEBODY'S head is being sized up for the chopping block. It may be Bracy's, it may be somebody else if he can scapegoat some schmoes on the desk (or if DiRienzo or Jelenic think it looks bad to run ANOTHER sports editor through the shit-through-a-goose revolving door so quickly -- as if they care), they'll launch those poor idiots instead. After they run out of scapegoats, they'll launch Bracy and some other fool will get strapped into the electric chair as Bracy's poor bloated corpse floats down the Susquehanna.

Good times.

 

Well lapdog, your posts haven't been focused on Bracy, but too many others have. About 70 of your 72 posts on the site have been about the disaster that is JRC.

Here's a suggestion. Have you ever thought about getting out?

And what is a sweet bippy?