Pressbox deadlines

The team employees are under no obligation to sit there all night while you blog, tweet, do video or whatever else you do. You have an office for that stuff.... use it if necessary.

I suspect adults can reach a compromise on these sorts of issues.But, no, as a reporter, you are there as a guest of the club and need to abide by their rules.

 

Team employees do not have to sit there and wait until I finish my work.

In my case and those of my colleagues, the team employees are long gone and back home while we're still working.

And what if you're on the road and your office is in another time zone?

And what if your hotel isn't just down the street because you had to save the company decent coin by staying 30-plus minutes away from the assignment?

I don't expect team employees to hold our hands and feed us. All I ask they at least attempt to make allowances for how times/deadlines/work responsibilities have changed.

 

This right here really set me off. This is blatantly telling you how to do a job. I don't know what innings you're usually on, but I know in general that most writers are usually on in early innings, and off by at least the sixth. For God's sake -- most of the story could happen in the eighth inning when the home team scores 8 runs to take an 8-7 lead or something along those lines. How exactly does being on the radio in the third and fourth inning effect the time in which you write your story in this event? His claim here is utter bullshit, and you should have argued with him right there.

I think some media relations personal in general need to be reminded every know and then that there job is to HELP the media do its job. Not that a reporter should help a media relations person get home early so he can watch TV.

 

Wouldn't you think that if he could go to the office and still make deadline, he could?

An hour is *not* reasonable anyway.

And it's pretty artificial.

 

An hour is artificial, but it shouldn't take you an hour to write a minor league gamer.

 

I highly doubt the OP is in the press box until 4 a.m. taking care of that stuff, so the "all night" stuff is just needless bluster.

But it's just as ridiculous to think the writer should be required to have all his work done and out the door within an hour, with a hall monitor standing over his shoulder looking at the watch and pointing to a sign.

I've never heard of a media relations person for a pro team doing something like that. Is there an MILB media contact you could check with to see if they have any thoughts on the matter?

 

Covered the Appy League for a long time and a couple of Frontier League games last month. Never, ever, had some PR guy trying to rush me into finishing up at some artificial time. I'm thinking you should go to his boss (the GM, maybe?) and see if he can convince the guy not to be such an assbag.

 

Sounds like you have a pretty paranoid dude that wants to get in your business. I wouldn't be surprised if looks over your shoulder when your typing the story. (Perhaps he'll have a job with the Redskins in the future.)
From my minor league days I never had a problem with the team PR guys. Since my deadline was 11, I was usually done within the hour. In the rare case where I stayed later, the PR guy usually just left me there, saying "lock the door behind you." That was also the case when I went on the road.

 

The employee is under an obligation to help his team get the best coverage it can, which means being under an obligation to give the writers there a reasonable amount of time to write a story. An hour is not reasonable in every case. And it's not reasonable to expect the writer to be writing his story before the game ends. There are plenty of instances where it's not worth starting until the game is over since you don't know what will happen. And since blogging, tweeting and everything else provides publicity for the team, then, yes, he is under an obligation to allow a reasonable amount of time for that if the writer needs to do it. This isn't about helping the writer; it's about doing what you need to do (within reason) to get your team covered well.

 

God bless a reporter who feels obligated to Tweet and blog during a minor-league baseball game. The 100 readers who care appreciate the effort.

 

I'm sorry but I don't see what the fuss is.

Yes, it's Class A baseball that we're talking about here and yes, the PR guy should be focused on getting his team as much publicity as possible. But how is an hour not enough time?

I have covered two Triple-A teams during my career and at my current shop, due to our deadlines, 15-30 minutes was about all I had after a game and that was more than enough because I was working on my story throughout the game. I'm sure that 100 people on this board can tell 100 different stories about a high school press box operator getting a little pushy after having to sit around for 20 minutes.

The biggest problem I have with this is the radio thing. Nobody is forcing you to go on the radio and if your product is suffering because of it (and not being able to produce your work in an hour may be an indication of that), then maybe you need to re-evaluate your priorities.

If you believe that the one hour rule is unfair, I'd have your editor deal with it. But I honestly don't think it's that ridiculous that the PR guy wants to be home by midnight each night.