No sports editor???

[Rhody31]

Seems like big papers need the SE. Smaller ones don't, but it screws the reporter who ends up running the section and not getting paid to do so.

There are some benefits
a) Don't have to deal with stupid editorial meetings
b) You decide when and how much you work
c) If people complain, you can just tell them how understaffed you are and you don't even have an SE

This also applies to the sports editor in a one-man shop department. Well, to me, anyway. They never make me go to meetings. Sports has always been this fringe area no one wants to intrude upon. "Oh, he knows what he's doing. Just let him do it."

The downside is that nobody else knows sports at all because they just leave me alone. So if I get sick or have a family emergency, the news assistant editor has to pick up the ball and he's going into it with no idea what's been going on.

It's why I take my vacations in mid-July and at Christmas. Nothing for them to worry about but posting wire stories.

We had a huge issue with the meetings two years ago.
The publisher at the time wanted us to come to editorial meetings, where we basically sat around, said what was going in our sections (we're a chain of weeklies; six editions per week) and rarely anything else.
Problem was, they weren't paying us overtime. We had a two-man staff, so we found a way to maximize our work output and showing up for a 9:30 a.m. meeting wasn't part of it.
So we stopped showing up. Publisher told us we had to. We didn't. Publisher got pissed, the required us to go. I didn't show up. We had a meeting and I told her that if we were going to do editors' work, we should be paid as editors.
So we stopped going to meetings. At some point, we were supposed to e-mail our schedule to our supervisor, but we never did that.
The funny thing is, they've picked and prodded at us more than any other department and we're the one that runs the best. Our sections look good, we budget hours intelligently and we get the most out of what we have. If you looked at sports compare to news, you'd never think they were the same paper.
Now that schieza is our supervisor, the micromanaging is gone. When I need to bench about something, I tell him, he brings it to the editorial meeting - like when we got beat on a story because our competitors' news department told their sports guys about the addition of hockey, something that came up at a school committee meeting; our news people never told us - and it gets solved accordingly.

 

[flexmaster33]

If you are hourly and are working OT to pick up the departed SE's duties, then put down EVERY MINUTE of OT. DO NOT WORK FOR FREE!!! Management needs to know the cost of doing business. I had an SE who routinely worked 50 hours a week, 60 in crunch time (playoffs, etc) of seasons. Somebody else has to pick up that work. Otherwise management will believe your department was overstaffed.

If the suits tell you that they can't authorize OT, when you're close to your weekly total, call your supervisor and let him know somebody else will 1) have to finish covering this game 2) get the paper out tonight 3) work the rest of the week. Because you don't want to go into unauthorized OT.

Amen to this

 

[Football_Bat]

It sucks that the hammer fell at Denton.

A sports staff of five (SE, 3 prep writers, UNT writer) at a 15,000-circulation paper is a rarity these days.

 

[FreddiePatek]

I know of plenty of shops with sports editors with no sports editors, if ya know what I'm sayin' ;D

 

[Football_Bat]

Denton has gone long periods before without an SE. They went almost a year without one after Steve Tracy passed away. I think they also went several months without one before Todd was hired. Somebody served as an acting SE in the interim.

The web guy in Denton was a sports editor way, way back in the 1970s and 80s.