Dear dimwit in the publisher's office

During basketball playoffs, our normal high school sports guy/SE ended up having to be rushed to the emergency room after the Friday night games. Saturday games could send both of our high school teams to the state tourney and they were being played an hour away. However, the local college I cover was hosting their first playoff game in over a decade. ME calls me trying to figure out what to do as she was also covering a timely event.

Turns out I could make both games and my ME said the publisher was going to be there anyways (he started out as a sports guy) so he was going to shoot pics. Got everything done (we're a weekly), however ended up running shots from earlier in the tournament because the publisher was only taking pics of his daughter's cheer team and he was on the sideline for the first half of both games. Then asked me why I didn't shoot pictures.

 

I guess I was lucky. I had my differences, big ones sometimes, with the publishers I worked for, but they were sharp cookies.

 

Makes me so happy to be retired.

 

Publisher had the paper in a hiring freeze, but magically his wife became a sales rep. Funny, she also became the highest-paid sales rep (hourly salary, not sure on her commission) while the rest of us got a 12.5% decrease in overall hours allowed to be paid (ie, 35 hour work week).
He also came up with grand ideas such as:
1) making it a 1-person sports department when it used to be 3.
2) After he hacked that down to 1, he decided just to eliminate the whole department. That lasted from early spring to late summer.

 

I could write a book about one publisher I had. Some of my favorites:
--He told me on three separate occasions to stop covering city council and school board meetings. Why? According to him, "no one cares about that stuff." Whenever he tried to attract new subscribers, what was his main sales pitch? That we cover city council and school board meetings.
--We once won an award for largest growth (by percentage) in circulation for weekly papers in our state. We were a bit confused, since we knew subscription numbers hadn't gone up in the past year. Come to find out our publisher had the office manager keep sending the paper to people, even after six months of non-payment, simply so they could be counted toward the total. Thus, our subscription numbers went up and we won the award from our state newspaper association. By the way, that was the only award he applied for in my four years there and it was a free contest to enter. After we won the award? People who hadn't renewed immediately stopped getting their paper.
--Shortly before Christmas one year, my sports reporter and I both got a nasty e-mail from our esteemed publisher that we needed to cover more sports at his son's high school: "It just seems to me that both of you have made (said school) a low priority on coverage in general. I don't know if it is because my kids go to the school, but there seems like there is an attitude that you don't want to give them coverage for some reason. I expect that both you will take greater responsibility in the future." Yeah, it had NOTHING to do with the fact it was a 3A school outside of our town, which had both a 5A and a 6A school.

 

Oh, this is going to be fun. Our former publisher was a grade-A knucklehead who did everything possible to run the paper into the ground.
Highlights:
1. She hired and fired an advertising director in about a year. She hired and fired a circulation director in a period of weeks.
2. She regularly refused to have any interaction with the general public. Anytime we had any kind of layoffs or staff reduction, we begged to put a story in just to tell people about it. She said no, and for the next seven years, people asked me where the paper was printed. She also would repeatedly get tickets to local chamber of commerce lunches and the like and never show up. I can't tell you how many of those things I went to where I ended up sitting next to an empty chair.
3. Working for her was like working for a 4-year-old. She wanted what she wanted when she wanted it. Overtime was forbidden and stringer budgets had to be kept down -- unless she got a complaint. Then money was no object.
4. She was a member of the local Elks Club. Not a bad thing, but it affected our coverage. She wanted items put in about local Elks parties -- which were closed to the public. And when someone there got in her ear about some coverage deficiencies, it was brought to bear on the newsroom staff.
5. She balanced her books on the newsroom's back. Positions would be dark for months at a time to get her books in line. The staff photographer got fired, she said not to fill it, and the position was ultimately eliminated. She then wondered why we didn't have as many photo galleries online.
6. She never read the newspaper. Once, she sat in on a staff meeting and said, "We need to do a story on Podunk City's finances." I said, "You mean like the one we do every year when the city goes through the budgeting process?" The city runs on a calendar year budget. This would have been in February or March. She didn't care. She sat there like she'd sent us out on the next Watergate.
7. Not only did she never say anything to us about any awards we would win, but she actually asked the city editor, "So why do we enter these contests? Do we ever win anything?"

She finally ran out of places to hide and other bodies to throw on the fire, and was shitcanned. It was close enough to New Year's Eve that I still had some champagne left over...

 

I had one of those editors, too. I took care of the problem by having my friends anonymously call in and tell the editor to cover the events that I wanted to cover. They also usually added how good of a job they though I was doing.

 

Also, I once had a general manager tell a co-worker that the problem with the newsroom is that it is the only department in the building that doesn't bring in money.

 

I heard that once from an ad weasel at my paper. I responded by saying I didn't think people were buying the paper to read his fucking ads.

 

Actually, many people do just that, buy the paper to read the ads. (And the stories too, of course.)

Love it or hate it, if you work for a media outlet, advertising pays your bills and feeds you and your family.

 

I'm not saying it doesn't, but I'll be damned if I'll sit there and be told that my department doesn't contribute to that revenue coming in.