New York Times' "byline beast"

I met him on an assignment. Seemed like a good guy. Asked a hell of a lot of questions and they were good. I can only imagine how bad a place like the Times is when it comes to professional jealousy.

 

Numbers aside, that was a well-written and interesting profile of a fairly low-level NY Times reporter.

Very well done and interesting. Feel like you get a good sense of the guy.

And note that his only quote was: “I guess I’m really old-fashioned, but I’d rather be the one writing about the news,” Mr. Chan said.

 

Nearly inhuman? I would guess I averaged 450 from 1993 to 2000.
And I wrote two books and freelanced along the way.

 

How many Times metro desk reporters have made you think that though? Churning out a lot of stories quickly and without making mistakes is probably one of the best ways to make a name for yourself on that desk. Let's be honest...city hall under Bloomberg is not the "sexiest" beat either. And if you get an out of town edition, you probably don't even get a lot of the stories.

 

Jack, your point is well taken. City Hall is one of those beats where the notes and short stories where a byline might get overlooked by a careless reader are the most important writing on the job.

 

So is he the Dooley Womack of Bylines or is Dooley the Gabriel Sherman of postpads?

 

I read this thing, and all I can do is wonder if its even remotely possible to have a successful career in this business if you don't have a Type-A personality.

 

If I could count unbylined briefs (community news stuff) I'd crush that guy in six months.

But at the Times, I'd say that's damn impressive.

 

Which brings us back to ... define "a successful career in this business" ... doesn't it?

But assuming that you mean working your way up the ladder, working for a major metro (or 200K+), kicking ass and taking names ... I still say yes. As a reporter, you don't have to have a Type A to be tenacious, or persistant, or to have shrug-it-offedness, or have networking skills, or an impeccable pedigree, or to connect with sources, or to have great writing and/or interpretive ability.

It's more a combination of those skills that indicates success than it is having a particular type of personality. IMO.

 

Admittedly, I haven't read this story yet.

But I started at a paper last summer and met a guy they called Turbo Reporter. Frankly, he was a little over the top with his emphasis on sensationalizing news. In one case, there was a boyfriend-versus-girlfriend's-white-trash-family dispute. He went to the girl's house the next day and actually took a photo of her answering the door with two teeth missing. Ultimately, he was fired for a host of ethics-related issues. But the guy wrote two to three stories every day. It was a five-dayer, so I'd guess that he had about 700 bylined stories each week.

In any case, 450 is nothing. I matched that at my last stop, and I also was responsible for layout of all news pages and editing the staff writers and sports editor. Of course, some of my stories were thrown together so quickly that I might have inadvertently written "This fucking sucks. Please save me." in the middle of a feature on a lady who collects feather dusters.

 

Pardon?

 

Did I mention that I left my advanced math compatriots in 10th grade after determining that I wasn't that keen on the subject, nor that skilled?