gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Five years ago, a sportswriter basically would write a story and turn it in that afternoon/evening for the next day's paper.

Now they have to do that plus blog, tweet, get it online ASAP, take pictures, maybe a video and do a podcast.

But it's all in the same 40 hours. There must have been a lot of solitaire playing in the old days.

 

More like there are a lot more errors now.

 

That's not the sportswriters' fault. That's because there are no more copy editors.

 

The 21st century sports writer.

 

Priceless.

 

On a side note it looks like the Gannett Blog is dying a quick death right now.

Good luck to all the Gannett folks and everyone else in our industry.

 

I'm not sure about everyone else, but that wasn't the set-up at any of my old stops before the recent shift in responsibilities.

Rarely did I just write one story in a day and do nothing else. Usually I wrote two stories daily - one pre-planned and one breaking news. Sometimes more depending on other staffing issues.

Plus there was the joy of monthly enterprise, and well, actually going to practice or talking with coaches, players and sources on your beat when there were no games.

You forgot to mention that some of us didn't always work only 40 hours a week. Usually it was much more.

And there's the assumption that people get everything done now in 40 hours. That's not the case in many cases. I actually write fewer stories now because there's not enough time to get everything else done, so something had to go.

 

A humble request: Can we update the title of this thread?

 

Sorry, Glen, I had no idea that some folks in this biz work more than 40 hours a week.

 

Should we change "december" to "july" or what?

 

If that's the case, we would end up changing the title to this thread every couple of months.