Shortest stint at a paper?

When in college, I got offered an internship for the summer and accepted.

Two weeks later, said newspaper went out of business.

 

Why do MEs and publishers at small papers always crumble quickly? Do they really think they want change or do they just need a warm body and think they can "break" the guy that they hired?

 

That's a hell of a good question. It was really weird in this case because they didn't need a "warm body" -- they already had Johnny Oldsportseditor, who was refusing to go along with their plans for change, so they fired him, and brought me in specifically for that purpose, and one week into my tenure, they get a dozen anonymous phone calls (several of them pretty transparently members of a phone brigade organized by ole Johnny O), saying "stop what you're doing immediately," and they tell me "the customer is always right."

 

that's the best post of the day. ... hell, i'm still wiping a tear from my eye.

 

My shortest stint wasn't all that short. I spent 10 months at a 45K circulation daily. The first seven months I was the chief sports copy editor, and I liked my job for the most part. Then the Sports Editor quit. Then I became the interim sports editor. Then basketball season started (I was supposed to cover a very, very good women's college basketball team). I wrote a preview story on the team. That was the only story I ever wrote about this top-five team. After three months as the interim sports editor, I was ready to take whatever job I could find. I ended up in N.C., and I was much happier. The crazy managing editor I worked for at the 45K paper was fired three or four months later. If I had known he was getting canned, I might have stayed.

 

Eight hours.

Went to HR my first day and learned that the payroll deduction for benefits was nowhere even remotely close to what was told to me beforehand. Just like that, one of the key reasons for me to make the move was gone, and at that point relocation didn't seem like a very good decision.

Could/should I have stayed? Maybe. I'll never know for sure. Things have worked out and it's been a great career.

 

One night.

I went from a small daily (which was a 70-minute commute from my house) for six months to a prep section of a large newspaper. After a year, I saw the prep section was a dead end and called the small daily back. I worked there one night and within an hour, it just felt wrong. I finished the football preview I was assigned and told them I made a mistake. They were pretty good about it. I ended up getting a couple of other jobs, but the frustration of the newspaper business was something I couldn't handle emotionally and I ended up getting a degree in Finance.

 

I have told this one on the board before ... at a PR office in Washington where I worked for a few years, we hired a new secretary. She arrived Monday morning, worked until lunch, left and never came back.

 

I think it's just a case in power. They want to express what they have in their hands, and when the SE doesn't want to be their puppet, then they get their dang feelings hurt and do what they have to do to get that power surge.

 

worked at a 13k daily for about 10 months and then left to go to the job I'm at now.

 

Three months is my shortest.

But I did it five times.

Second job: Thomson took over the paper right after I started and wanted to eliminate two-thirds of the three-man department. I quit instead (and nobody ended up laid off) and returned to my home area and my girlfriend (now wife).

Third job: Similar to Starman, I was hired to revamp a section, but management got cold feet after some of the changes started taking place. I ended up being fired after one too many battles and returned to be AME at my first paper.

Fifth job: See third job. Different place, same problem. Went BACK to first paper, yes, again, this time as acting managing editor after managing editor gets fired for drinking on the job.

Sixth job: Turns out, there was a good reason for leaving that paper the two times before.

Eighth job: I was hired as a consultant to coordinate a redesign (pretty big paper, too), with the plans on becoming their design editor. But something was strange about the leadership -- something I couldn't put my finger on. Three weeks after I quit, the editor resigned and all but one of his deputies are demoted.

All this before my 25th birthday.

It's a wonder any newspaper has hired me since.

 

Speaking of shortest stints ... do you leave anything off your resume?

I mean, say you hated your first job out of college -- could you get away with leaving it off the resume?