Byline quotas....anybody else dealing with this?

I know of a writer who, if he wasn't told to get his byline count up, would never appear in print.

 

That's how I was able to get away with dropping the quotas. My publisher also wanted weekly reports from me but I never turned one in. I'm fairly certain that after about 2 or 3 weeks of counting bylines and the number of words in each story every day for two papers, she got tired of it really fast.

 

Corporate had our writers on a byline count for a while. New editor came in last month and told them to stick it.
One of the best things I've ever seen a boss do.

 

And now I'm missing being a college journalist, mostly cracking the office fridge and being greeted by 60+ beers. Good times

 

Most college journalists become good waiters.

 

I'd imagine most realize they are better off not entering the business.

 

At my last stop we had an ME who told the sport department in a meeting that we weren't pulling our weight and the news side was almost doubling the amount of bylines that the sports department had. There were 3 full-time writers in sports, 8 in news. So one night after deadline we pulled two months worth of papers and counted. The months we pulled were May and June. The top three byline counts in the newsroom were the three full-time sports guys, and it wasn't even close. We took this information to the ME a week after the meeting and he said that byline counts weren't important.

 

I'd told my last ME that she was full of it when she looked at my byline count, which didn't include the crap roundups the news staff did that counted as a byline or had paginating duties factored in. She didn't like it when I said the news staff wasn't pulling their weight.

 

[managing editor] I see the news people in here all the time during the day. While they are working, where are the sports people? Sleeping till 9 a.m., coming in in the afternoon. Lazy fanbois, all of them.[/managing editor]

 

Are the 5 agate pages not on a common platform, to where you can just change out the nameplate and page number, maybe update standings for the late edition, and be done with it?

 

I worked at a place like that. Was a one-man department that didn't finish pagination until midnight to make sure to get everything I wanted in the paper. However, if I was not there at 8 a.m. to be there all day answering my calls, the ad department and front desk would bitch to the publisher that I didn't do enough.
Glad I got away from that place.

 

I wish we had them at my papers - but we're a chain of weeklies. Doing 15 a week at a daily is tough. I'd try doing a game story and a notebook for each game or try and do doubleheaders.
During the regular season I'm usually good for 10-12 bylined stories a week; playoffs is somewhere in the 15-20 range. I also design three of our sections.
Of course, most of our editors just do layout and "office work" and it boggles my mind when they say there's no time to write stories when I'm doing the work I do. Our news reporters usually do 5-7 bylined stories a week and have to write up the cops and courts stuff and I still have no idea how they can say they worked an honest 40.
Basically, you have to learn to be more efficient and where you can save time. Don't go to the office for the sake of going to the office; use that time to write about something - column, weekly roundup, feature, anything.
Are you taking your own photos? If you are, tell your boss that those should count toward the byline count. If you shoot a game and cover it, that's two bylines.