Interesting week - 8/23/2008

As you’ve likely sauntered this way from my wife’s blog, there’s no need to rehash the news about the cat, beyond: We have a new one. It’s older than we thought. It’s quite sweet and already fixed and declawed. I can now step onto the porch for a cigarette unmolested.

(“An Unmolested Cigarette” – where’s Gore when you need him? [I mean Al Gore, not Gore Vidal. {If that’s not funny to you, probably nothing I say will be. (It’s been entirely too long since I nested brackets so far that it cycled back to parens.)}])

No, the news of the week revolves around work. Somehow, I find myself, through deed, not word, sliding inexorably toward some sort of quasi-management position in which I become a dotted line to the editor on the org chart. Well, as one of the deskers mentioned this week, we’re really all dotted-lined to him, by virtue of the fact that our boss does nothing.

But it’s a special breed of nothing. One that, in fact, makes me realize that Scott Adams did not actually exaggerate when he created Wally. My boss actually walks around, coffee mug in hand, from tiny office to tiny office, talking to people about things they have no interest in hearing. What could be worse? Well, when he’s done traipsing about, he returns to his office. The one I share with him. The man cannot say anything once. A classic example of this would be “You probably want to do this, because, you see, you probably want to do this.” Given a set [N], “this” is the same thing for all N. He also seems to have been sick on that day in kindergarten wherein the concept of the “inside voice” is imparted.

This includes the phone conversations he has with the girls and parents involved with the soccer team he coaches. In the office. On deadline. With me in there.

Anyway, he’s been working there since 1979, and short of the Iranian hostage crisis and Skylab falling, the only other thing of note that I’m aware of from that year was being born. He’s the fixture sort of co-worker, the one that won’t get fired for any reason.

Not that he hasn’t really been giving it the college try in the past week.

One of the deskers (we’ll call him “Greg”) is on vacation, and has been for the past two weeks. This is not, inherently, a problem. However, he is responsible for doing the bulk of the features work, some of which must be done on Mondays. Our intrepid boss failed to schedule anyone for the past two Mondays, and last week, one of my co-workers (we’ll call her “Dawn”) sucked it up and said, “I’ll come in on Monday.” She works Tuesday through Saturday, and we have a moratorium on overtime.

Because said boss was on vacation until after Greg started vacation, it was a decision that had to be made without a supervisor around. In the end, no harm, no foul. But as Dawn looked to Week Two of six days, with a young son, no less (not that I want one, but she never makes excuses about missing work for her son; quite the reverse, so I respect her), I offered to take her Saturday shift this week. She wanted time off, and I wanted overtime.

We ran it past the boss, who wasn’t quite sure why any overtime was necessary. Explaining that the need to cover 11 shifts with two people has a nasty remainder didn’t quite clear things up for him, and the idea that he, as the only exempt employee in the department, cover the fucking shift himself was simply a nonstarter.

The compromise was that I’d try to shave some hours off during the week, given that layoffs are in the immediate future, and I’d rather not walk in looking like I was wearing a shirt from Target. A house-brand shirt from Target.

That was the end of last week.

On Monday, I came in and another co-worker (let’s say, “Phil”) was quite irritated with our boss because on Sunday, he showed up fully five hours late because whatever soccer tournament his girls were in, they won the first game, and he simply had to stick around for the next one.

So Phil has to report to the editor that our boss didn’t show up until 7 p.m. on Sunday (here, I gently remind the reader that we’re a morning newspaper with an 11:45 p.m. deadline). After I hear this story, Dawn also reports that the boss didn’t show up until 4:30 on Saturday. (Sundays, if you haven’t noticed wherever you may reside, are large papers. And contrary to popular belief, gnomes and elves do not produce said paper.) Whoever’s running the Sunday paper is supposed to be in by 2 p.m. (When I’ve been running Sundays, I haven’t come in until 3 or so, but that’s because I spend the square root of zero hours walking around with a coffee mug.)

So, the boss fuckup trifecta is in play. Not avoiding OT in his department and showing up, in aggregate, 8 hours late. Any further tricks up your sleeve there, boss?

Well, the city editor comes into my office on Monday and says, “So I assume [boss] talked to you about the election package.” Tuesday was our primary election. “Umm, no,” I said. “You’re joking,” he said. “Did you really expect a different answer?” I countered. The look on his face said no, he didn’t expect it, but he was sure as hell hoping for it. From there came a litany of the sorts of language romantically ascribed to newsrooms, even though we can’t smoke at our desks and the bottle in the bottom drawer is no longer allowed.

Ah, yes, the election package graphics agate boxes. The boss did come in on Tuesday, his day shudder off, and offered to come in between 9 and 11 if we needed him to fill in the agate. He figured it would take about 20 minutes. Phil told him that we’d manage just fine.

Between working on the wire pages and the live coverage, I ask Phil if he can get me a copy of the page templates, because there are a few bits of wheel reinvention that we engage in every night that I’d prefer to have automated. He’s thrilled that someone else wants to take up the task, so he points me to the template, I make the changes, and then we wait for a few days for live pages to propagate.

Meanwhile, Election Night proceeds apace, and I’m done with my inside pages around 11. Phil asks if I can fill in the agate. He’s still working on A1, so of course I say I can help. And then I discover that all the data the reporters were supposed to have collected for the agate weren’t collected. And then I discover that what was collected came from different sources. And then, I discover that the city editor, who was supposed to compile the rest, you know, down to the fucking state Lands Commissioner, was instead posting stories to the Web. (We’re a Web-first publication, don’tchaknow.)

Seventy-five minutes of aggregating, formatting and inputting ensues. The only things that keep my blood pressure in the healthy range are a smoke break and the knowledge that I’m being paid professional overtime wages to do basic data entry.

We blow clear through deadline, and by the time Phil’s A1 is done and my agate is good to go, we’re 45 minutes past deadline. What this means is: A1 and the agate did not get proofed. Once again, the front page of the paper and the only clump of data people would care to read did not get a second read. This is what we like to call “amateur hour.”

Now, Phil and I have egg on our faces (him more so than me, thankfully) because the boss had offered to come in. But we only realized our shortfall at the tail end of his “available” time, and regardless, the roaming coffee mug would have slowed us down more than anything else. Thank god upper management knows this to be the case.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, it surfaces that, in the face of layoffs, my brilliant boss decides to tell a room full of people who don’t work in the newsroom that he hopes lucrative buyouts are in the offing, because “I’m done with this job.” One of these people reports directly to the circulation manager, who immediately passes off the information to the editor. Bad move. He’s acting like he wants to be fired, and when buyouts are offered, they go to people who have been performing at least satisfactorily. Which is to say, he’d more likely be fired with no severance than get a buyout (and they’re almost guaranteed to be skimpy, anyway).

So Wednesday rolls around. I talk with Dawn and Phil, asking if they’d talked with the editor about the clusterfuck, recently in progress, on Election Night. No, they haven’t, but if I’d like to get a word in, feel free.

I go into the editor’s office, having already on Monday told him about the OT situation and how I’d try to limit it, to which I got that sort of knowing sigh of, “Of course your boss won’t work it. Don’t worry, there won’t be a witch hunt.” (quote not verbatim)

Under advisement, I mention that I’m “concerned” about how Tuesday night went. This is true within PC guidelines, but my bigger concern is that we actually have our shit together for, oh, say, the actual presidential election.

The editor says he understands my concerns, and could I e-mail him those and any suggestions I might have?

I don’t really know when I snapped. It might have been right before working on the templates, or it could have been the hour-plus I spent on agate. But what ensued as an email was not what a copyeditor would write, it was what the news editor should write:

As we discussed, there was some confusion on the night of the primaries as to responsibilities for compiling numbers and a couple of other rough patches that resulted in the paper being 45 minutes late to press without the front page or results data being proofed.

As to the data collecting itself, it would be helpful, looking ahead to the general election, to specify a single source for tabular figures that would be our source for state figures. Different people were using AP results, county website results and secretary of state website results. Even if the data had been gathered in time to avoid being late, it would have been nigh impossible to get them double-checked efficiently. Judging from the amount of time it took me to compile and enter roughly 75% of the results table, roughly an hour and 15 minutes, this stage could be expected to take 2 hours in full. I would recommend a specific cut-off time where results are printed out and entered, with the printouts retained for checking, instead of having two people visit the same Web site.

Hopefully, the AP will have graphics and/or tables ready to go for national elections. If that’s not the case, or if we’re planning on doing our own formatting on that, then that’s more time that needs to be taken into consideration. And worst-case scenario, we have a third-straight election without a clear winner in at least one top race.

One good way to handle division of labors on the desk would be to have the entire front page (and inside election pages, ideally a couple without ads) designed in advance, with the results breakout boxes duplicated on a separate document that houses the full agate. If the formatting is properly in place, this would mean results would simply be pasted twice, and once the breakouts are done, they can replace the dummied boxes when A1 and other pages are released.

Pre-designed packages can hem in reporters to a certain length; however, on deadline on election night, there’s rarely time to write the Great American Novel, and jumps and wire can be adjusted accordingly, anyway.

The other thing I would recommend, especially in light of 2000 and 2004, is a significant extension of deadline. While we may only need 45 minutes, wiggle room would help us avoid the dreaded question heds. Accordingly, I’d suggest moving the budget meeting back by an hour or two.

Just as a suggestion, here’s how I might see a three-person desk working: First reader/data compiler. First reads happen before data need to be compiled, so this makes sense as a progressive position for the evening. A1/Election designer/inside proofer. Proofs inside pages, then gives second reads on stories for the page, paginates election coverage and places completed graphics and breakout boxes. Inside designer/final proofer. Gives first reads on and paginates wire pages. Since those can be done earlier in the shift, this person can then shift to proofing on A1/Election coverage and ultimately checks data figures from the printouts provided by the compiler.

I anticipate senior editors would also be available for final looks.

These are just my suggestions from running election coverage in the past, adapted for our situation. Since some people will be looking to us to tell them what happened in the election, I think at least three sets of eyes are key on this important issue.

Hope I haven’t overstepped my bounds on this.

I’ve been management before, and I don’t like it, but in the absence of competent management, I know how to run election coverage. In fact, after sending the e-mail, it occurred to me that I’ve never had a general that I didn’t run. I was managing editor in 2000, news editor in 2004, and I know how to cover an election. Presidential election nights are one of the things that reaffirm my love for this industry.

So, that e-mail gone, the week’s just a downhill slide, right?

I came in on Thursday a half-hour late, as per the terms of shaving hours off. No one talks to me, not even my loquacious boss. I mention to him that I’d setup new quick keys for myself for horizontal scaling, and here I find out why I’m a pariah. The new style sheets? They’re in effect. And I made a rather large error in saving the document with the character stylesheet set to Drop Cap, which means everything is now coming in as ITC Garamond (kerned out to 50, no less), and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

It took me 20 minutes to figure it out, and once that was done, all was well. Phil even calmed down after cussing a blue streak that would make a sailor blush. Amazing what happens when you own up to your fuckup, apologize and tell everyone it’s your fault, not Phil’s. In fact, 20 minutes after I came up with the solution, he was back to normal. Funny how adults act.

So I figure, this is it for the week. It’s downhill from here.

This afternoon, I come in, and of course, the big news on the wire is the speculation about Obama’s running mate. We put the paper to bed around 10, and the wife’s not off of work yet, so I walk home.

And I’m home for about 20 minutes before I check the wire from home, and, sure as shit, a Democratic source has finalized Biden as Obama’s running mate. This is 40 minutes before our true deadline. I’ve cracked open a beer and am ready to settle in.

But this simply won’t do. We can’t have wild conjecture when the confirmation has happened with 40 minutes to spare. So after getting nowhere trying to call people at the office, I convince the wife to drive me into work, where nobody happens to be (on the news side, anyway).

I walk into prepress and ask if it’s too late to replate (black only) on A1 and A8 (thank god the pages married and that’s where the story and refer were, and thank god we already had a mug of Biden ready to go). The answer? You need to stop the press.

Thankfully, this wasn’t entirely true, as I walked into the pressroom and they were finalizing plates to get ready to go. So I shout out (everyone’s wearing earplugs), “REPLATE - I need a replate – BLACK ONLY – on A1 and 8.” They took it in stride, and after five minutes back in the newsroom, I’ve pumped out a new black for A1 and 8, and we then wait 15 minutes for it to go to the negative for final proofing.

I look it over as the press guy’s watching, and I look at him and say, “Let’s run it.” With a bit more joy than text can convey – and wildly above my pay grade.

I’ve never stopped the press, and I’ve been doing this for nearly seven years.

So, new stylesheets, a dictum on election coverage and a replate. Not the week I was expecting, but if you want an adrenaline rush, stop the press sometime. It makes you feel like you’ve made a difference, and sometimes, that’s the validation you need.

Now, let’s hope they get it in register.