Typical work week

Here it is. More a typical work day, but you get the point:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/26595/

 

Typical work week?

There is no such thing, my friend. There's always a coach quitting, a kid signing or a game to cover at the worst possible time.

Get used to it now.

 

I will only add that after the past two weeks, I earned three extra PTO days and that my editor didn't even flinch when I told him how much extra I'd worked.
So much for June being my dead time of year.

 

My job:

... it's a 4-day work week beginning on Thursday.   It goes Thurs, Fri, Sun, Mon.    Sunday and Monday can be pretty brutal, with we editors staying til midnight and beyond. The magazine even has hotel roooms in NYC for those of us who don't want to go all the way home on Sunday night just to come back a few hours later on Monday morning. But we do get Saturdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.

(sorry for the plaige, Broadway Joe)

(all right, this isn't really my job, just a little cross-post humor)

 

I do a little news-side work and cover sports for our paper, and my week looks something like this:

I work Tuesday - Saturday. Except when I have to cover the school board, when the week is Monday - Saturday.

I generally get to work around 9:30 a.m. I leave whenever the last sporting event is over. About once a week I go home at 5 p.m. The rest of the week, I'm there until at least 8 p.m. though sometimes it's after 11 p.m.

Thankfully it's summer and I'm four weeks away from moving on, so things are pretty slow right now. Because they're slow, though, I picked up some freelancing gigs to a) supplement my income and b) keep me entertained.

Learn to love the hours or they will eat you for lunch (and dinner, and at times, breakfast).

 

Management here, in the last several years, has become much more "liberated" with the concept of unpaid overtime. Time and time again, the governmental authorities responsible refuse to do a damn thing about it, instead delivering the impression that management is to be commended for creative thinking in order to improve employee productivity and thus boosting the nation's economy.

Repeated layoffs and stampede-style attrition has reduced the staff here by 1/3 in the past three years. The big bosses routinely pile 11 hours of work into every 8-hour shift, and begin every work day with a precisely-itemized list of more shit they want done, plus a blistering, savage evisceration of the previous day's edition and ominous threats to fire everybody they have to, to get the "job done right."

They do remain consistent on one point: they refuse to pay any overtime. None whatsoever.

So, come in an hour early, skip lunch, stay late an hour or so to do an advance page for tomorrow. Whatever it takes to get the job done.

 

We must work at the same place, Starman.

However, we do have something called a union, so anything over 75 hours per two-week paycheck gets "banked" so that you're supposed to use it as time off.

As far as hours goes for sports, me and my guys work about 3-11, 5 days a week each and always two consecutive days off. All three of us work on Fridays, but otherwise there are two people on every day. We've held this schedule for the past 18 months and it works wonderfully.

I will say this: it's far better than any other place I've worked. At previous papers I often worked seven-day, 60-hour work weeks with no regard given to any overtime, and certainly no credit.

 

One place I was at, in the northern part of the state, paid as a straight salary, yet they always made us punch in when we got there, punch out for lunch and punch out for the day. Of course, this was to make sure we were all doing 40 hours (they didn't care that everyone there was routinely over the 40-hour mark).

Anyway, about a year after I left there, friend (who also didn't work there) calls me and asks if I got a check from the old employers. I hadn't, so I called them and they had a check for back OT I was owed.

Apparently, some people (we think it was the backshop) filed complaints with the labor board. And since they made us punch in, there was a pretty good record of how many hours we had worked.

 

There really is no typical.

I'm on the desk at my paper, but the writers work very inconsistent hours. Sometimes they're in the office at 8 a.m. and out by 2, sometimes they're in at 2 p.m. and out by midnight.

Expect to work all weekend.

Sports is hell. If you want good hours, go work in features. 9-5 monday-friday.

 

True. I just consider myself lucky because I work for fairly spineless management.