d/fw morning star-telegram news

Lord save me from the sports boys.
As one of those lazy news guys I'm only mildly offended.
The I'm the only person who works hard at my has been discussed before.
It is false.
Jesus was less martyr than some of yall

 

thank you.

 

All newspaper work is episodic, that is, there are peaks and valleys of activity. In my personal case, during a Red Sox playoff run or Olympics, I might be on the clock (air travel counts!) 12-hours plus for two or more weeks straight. Then in February, I'd go to a college basketball game or Celtics game, or write at home on baseball four days a week. No way I saw 40 hours.
News is no different. Our guys didn't get much sleep for a month after 9/11. A big story will involve multiple reporters skating double-shifts for a week or more.
IMO, the problem with ad sales is this. Like every other profession, there are great salesmen, some terrible salesmen, and the bulk of them strung out along the bell curve.
Honestly now. If you were good at selling things, would you, today, pick newspaper advertising space as the product you wanted to sell? Chryslers would be easier to pitch. So I fear newspapers are not getting the best and brightest of the sales trade.

 

Which is why if I were a publisher in these kind of economic times, I'd be raising my sales commissions to insane levels, especially for new advertisers they bring in. Give the sales staff every possible reason to knock on every door.

 

T.R. Sullivan owned the market and is sorely missed. He hammered the regional competition in a way that has not been seen since the J. Oates era. Reading anything but FW's Rangers and baseball material is like reading a train schedule _ boring and predictable. Long live T.R. _ a wonderful guy and great historian. May his tribe increase. And, yes, I stopped getting any paper in North Texas when he left.

 

Got word from my buddy that they're having some pow-wow at the S-T today to talk about all this.

 

I can only speak from my experience. The 60/70-hour weeks outnumbered the 30-hour weeks, by far. I'm not complaining; that's what it took to get the job done and so that's what I did. I'm quite pleased with the quality of work presented to readers. I could not have cared less how many hours the advertising people put in. If they filled the paper and it only took an hour a day, God bless 'em.

Just my two cents.

 

Just like it's sort of silly for me to come in at 9 a.m. when there's no one available to interview. I can do my writing at a more convenient time. Actually, it's funny, some of my best features I wrote on my home computer at 2 a.m. when the phones weren't ringing and I could actually concentrate.

 

You know, if the powers that be were interested in doing this right, we'd see this in Transactions at some point:

Newspapers -- The Dallas Morning News trades baseball writer Evan Grant to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for two writers and an editor to be named later.

Is that too much to ask? Of course it is.

 

And no one can type with one hand faster, too.

 

Thanks, T.R. Good to hear from you.