Yahoo Sports "in chaos"

I'll have my email call your email.

 

Ever try cutting that down with e-mail filters/rules, or just didn't have the time? I swear by 'em.

 

Not sure it was an option. It was writers/deskers/TV side/etc. all exchanging information on stories.

 

Ouch; so it would've had to be coordinated among multiple people. That's no fun.

 

The Big Lead once again puts out a semi-non story with shoddy reporting. :

 

Sounds to me Yahoo is doing just fine with reporters living in whatever city they want to live in. Why should yahoo force people to go to fucking meetings when there is real work to be done that they do well?

 

Office vs. Virtual:

Despite what my esteemed friend Moddy says, I'm not all that sold on the idea of having a completely virtual office, with almost nobody being in the same place.

Writers, sure. They need to be scattered about, and it's probably better they don't have to deal with the meeting culture in most offices. No problem there.

Disclaimer: About 30 years ago -- geez! -- when writers used to actually go to offices to write, there was a lot of exchange of ideas and camaraderie and people simply getting to know each other that doesn't exist today. Obvious case: We have writers on our staff who have never met some of our editors, and I'm pretty sure we've got at least a couple of writers who have never met each other. I think we're missing something in those circumstances.

Desk, I will continue to believe until I retire that for the most part, the desk staff has to be in the same room, planning and working together. There are dynamics that simply can't be recreated through e-mail and AIM or whatever. Aside: I still have no problem with simply calling across the room to somebody about some business that needs to be done, and sometimes, particularly if it's a non-editorial person, they look at me as if I'm from Mars. And I've got colleagues who sit two desks from each other who conduct business through AIM (not confidential stuff you don't want to broadcast; routine stuff). I don't get it.

I'm sorry: Techology or no, I'm not giving up the idea that there's value to human interaction that's done the old-fashioned way: Without the aid of electronics.

(This doesn't even get into the notion that you can't read nuance in e-mails that you get from somebody actually saying something, which can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.)

Some people seem to celebrate the creation of a newsroom where nobody has to see anybody else as a triumph of technology. OK, but it's at the expense of the human element. In this, I'm like Patton: "Wonder weapons? God, I don't see the wonder in them."

 

SF nailed it...as usual.

 

This is spot on.

 

I can function all right w/o setting foot in a newsroom these days, I suppose, but that would have been not only unthinkable but a career-ender back in the day SF_Express was talking about. And not because of the technology then -- because of ME then.

Starting out, I needed to be around veterans, peers, people who knew their way around the block, blowhards and drunkards who still might have an idea or pearl of wisdom to drop and even pain-in-the-butt editors and (yes!) composing room people who kept me in my snot-nosed place. I wouldn't have lasted in this business -- and this is important -- nor would I have wanted to last through my 20s and 30s if not for the lure of, and the learning in, real newsrooms.

I write about people who are fortunate to move through their professional lives in teams and on teams. Yet that sense of team is fading fast from our business, and it is a considerable loss. Having a central gathering place is the first and easiest step of team-building. Lacking that, any second, third or subsequent steps often never get addressed.

It's easy as we gain experience and log years that we feel we've given more to this than we've gotten back, and one way to rationalize things is to see working from home, for example, as payback for all the hours ripped away from the family. Fine. But there is a cost involved to the work and even to our own satisfaction.

 

You know, the whole "young people learning from veterans" was something I didn't even address, except obliquely, and yeah, that was pretty important, although I suppose the curmudgeon in me will observe that today's young people probably think they don't need it, because they are, after all, gol darn whippersnappers.

You know what else is lost in this whole "everybody works everywhere" system? Going out and drinking together. And I'm telling you -- a lot of problems were solved or headed off over a beer in my career. And I worked a lot of composing rooms where being drinking pals with some of the principals saved me a lot of grief.