Yahoo Sports "in chaos"

This.

Moddy, it worked because you had one number you could call to get any of 4-5 people.

 

What's the advantage of having editors scattered? Able to hire better people who might not want to move to a brick-and-mortar office? I can see it as a hurdle to scale by attention to details, but it sure doesn't seem like a positive.

Having writers scattered has obvious benefits. The last place I want to see reporters/writers is sitting around a newsroom. The news ain't happening there.

Bosses I've known who wanted people to work from the office were lousy bosses who needed face time as a way of measuring performance. Too lame to measure their people's output.

 

Perfect. I was going to volunteer my services to work in a dysfunctional environment such as the one at Yahoo--and if The Big Lead says it, and a poster with ONE post says it, it must be true!!!--but this summed it up even better.

 

As somebody who has done both sides (writer and editor), I very much appreciate this post, moddy. So many folks out there in the business don't get it.
I've spent my career primarily at three places, one where things were very loose and office presence was not encouraged, one where the powers that be pulled the sports department into the office and one where the SE tries to create an "office-centered" environment.

Generally, the loose ship ran the best, had the most creativity and the best morale. But it also had problems with how easy it was to abuse all of the leeway you were given and things tended to go off the rails from time to time. The other two places have high turnover, one centered with discontent with upper management and the other based on discontent with the heavy-handed and meddling management style within the department.

Someday, I'll be in a situation that is more like what you talk about. So far, however, after 23 years in the business, I've yet to experience it.

 

Count me as one of the other 1.3%

 

Not just in sports, either. The govt will be going with telecommuting more, especially since all that lost work during the snowstorm last winter. Half my project managers work from home at least once a week. It's completely possible for everyone in our division to work from home 3-4 days a week and come in for meetings one day a week.

 

I'd go there in a heartbeat (Not that they're calling...) , but that doesn't mean Laughlin isn't despised by some/most of the writers there.

 

I know two people (at least) who work there. One of them told me that virtually everything is done by e-mail and the volume is so unwieldy it is easy for things to get lost in the shuffle.
That subject came up because I told this person that I had e-mailed the other one several times and never gotten a response (nothing serious, just chit-chat). I asked if the other person was big-timing me.
I was then told about the massive e-mail procedure. You can log-on to begin work each day and find 400 new e-mails to be deciphered and acted upon. I was told that missed or ignored e-mails are common and not to think the other person was intentionally ignoring me.
It didn't sound like a very good system.

 

At my last job, I would have KILLED to only have gotten 400 e-mails a day. During my three-day weekends, I'd come back to more than 1,600 at times.

 

Some of it might be common sense stuff. Most of the guys there no longer work for the guy who hired them. That always makes for a tough situation. I'm sure it's tougher when you have contract negotiations, hell some of these guys have agents.

I don't know anything about Laughlin other than the fact that my friends at Yahoo don't like him.

 

Only 98.7 percent?