September: Four weeks of hell

That's the way they do it here. Freshmen on Thursday. During rivalry week here, they'll play a frosh-JV doubleheader Thursday and the varsity Friday, with kickoff a half-hour earlier. More gate receipts.

 

I surprised anyone charges for a freshman or JV game.

 

Exactly. We bumped up the section from four pages to six in an effort to get more things in. The downside is that it's more pages to do. But that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make most days.

We're a mid-sized daily that attempts to cover all our bases. We can't realistically say "Well, we won't have an MLB page today because we have 6 high school events on the schedule". There are a fair number of readers who don't give a bleep about the high schools. So it's a balancing act.

No way in hades am I staffing anything lower than the high school varsity level... and I do less and less of that with each passing year. I did not invest six years (and heaven knows how many thousands of dollars) of university for the priviledge of covering Little League. We accept submissions from readers on sub-varsity events and run them on a Community Sports page in midweek (Monday deadline for submissions).

 

Point out the spot where I said I worker hardest or even harder than anyone. All I pointed out is we don't have desk people.

I totally agree that quality suffers. But the company I work for doesn't particularly care about that. If we had enough people to properly do what we'd like, then that would cut into the bottom line. Heck, we've been without a police reporter since June because the guy had enough and quit. Management doesn't want to hire anyone. We are a daily freakin newspaper without a crime reporter. So no, quality is not high on the list of priorities.

 

wait ... you covered a game and left at halftime? and got the final score from a person operating a scoreboard? ... and you wrote a story how?

 

That's a problem, if you ask me. At our shop, it's almost as if the attitude is "Get 'er done. Don't matter how it looks or if it's right. Just get 'er done and get 'er done as soon as possible."

 

It must stink working for ME Larry the Cable Guy.

 

With my fingers

Seriously, I wrote 3-4 paragraphs on the first half soon as I got back to the office and waited for the phone to ring with the second half details. Granted, it wasn't Pulitzer stuff, but it got the job done. Sometimes ya have to do that.

 

True enough. That's what we've devolved into. It can work for a while, but not long term. I've put in about 60 hours each of the last four weeks and that's NOT going to become the norm. And, no, I'm not traveling to cover college football on Saturdays because someone (me) has to put the section out.

We're all struggling with how to balance responsibilities, get a section printed 7 days per week and not lose what little sanity we have left.

 

Long term? As far as I know it's never been done any way other than that at our place. Even in the best of times, out entire staff was a skeleton crew. I've been around since 1994, and I know it's never been any different. It seems like I've heard that it was early 80s when they finally decided to add more than one full time sports writer.

 

In the same boat here, except I do have to shoot photos. Pretty much everyone in this area does.

 

I hear you. Look, I've worked at papers of varying sizes and I understand that each has its unique challenges.

Our particular challenge is balancing the various things that are going on. It's not "local at all cost". We won't ditch certain things (like Thursday's NFL opener or the US Open) just to accomodate the volleyball team. If that were the case I'd gone so fast it would seem like a hurricane blew in. We try to squeeze it in, cutting all of it somewhat. So I was curious to know how others in the same boat handle this particular challenge.