Beaten like rented mules.....

Newsroom staff may soon feel like they are being beaten like rented mules. I wish I could claim the metaphor, but a friend repeated the "beaten mules" thing to me yesterday.

Word has come that the goshawful "Making a Difference" feature will now anchor the new "People" section in the Saturday Flint Journal.

Staff members were told that the tired, worn-out feature will now be elevated to cover status for the weekly insert. Staff members were told that the feature must now be 20-inches long, up from the already difficult 12-inch required size and must include three pieces of art. Trust me getting one piece of art out of those things was often a major challenge.

I'm told that the feature also comes with an extended deadline.

Uggggh! What a joke, this is a feature that never should have been instituted and now is being promoted to rock star status in the paper. Is there any wonder this paper is financially bleeding.

The Journal also featured a story on a coming state police academy and it included a quote from "a man on the street." Just guessing, but they probably forced some reporter to head to the nearby mall or bus station to find some anonymous schmoe to make a useless comment on the story.

It's painfully obvious that the newspaper leadership is plowing ahead at high speed on a road that leads, at least to nowhere, and at most to disaster.

And for all the editorial management bluster about how the paper would do "everything" it had been doing even with less staff, it is painfully obvious to everyone what a joke that was.

People in Lapeer County, and no doubt Shiawassee County, have completely noticed the dearth of local news in the paper and some have told me they are likely to cancel soon. Other coverage, especially local "real" features and business news have diminished as well.

Don't blame the reporters either, they have impossibly large beats and expectations to cover. Even with their story quotas - one story a day plus a Sunday story every other week - it would not be possible to be everywhere they need to be.

Beaten like a rented mule may soon fit.

He's baaack!

After a successful 2 1/2 week trip to California I'm back in Michigan and ready to resume blogging - and yes I know I could have done it remotely, but I left my computer and inspiration at home.

Anyway, thanks to all my wonderful hosts, which included my cousin Cynthia, my sons William and Timothy, my granddaughter, Brittany, even my ex-wife, Christine, was helpful in snagging Timothy and I a great - and inexpensive - condo for a two night stay near Santa Rosa. Thanks also to Atherton Police Lt. Glenn Nielsen for arranging a reunion lunch for me and some retired cop buddies and for a ride-along with a young officer.

A special thanks to my old cop buddy, Kenny, who let me stay in his El Dorado Hills mansion for a night. It was good to reconnect with Kenny and another old police friend, Steve.

For a time it seemed I would have to rearrange to travel home on an ark with all the rain (and boy did it rain while I was there) but American Airlines did a wonderful job getting me back to Michigan. Getting to California was not so easy, but wasn't the airlines fault. Mother Nature was to blame for that.

Thank goodness for unlimited rental car mileage as I logged about 2,400 miles on my Alamo rented Impala. (This shameless plug is my attempt to show how blogging could one day be profitable).

Anyway I returned from pouring rain to dreary overcast skies so not much changed in the 2,400 mile trip home.

Before I formally resume my newspaper bashing here's a couple great jokes I heard while on the trip.

A guy calls in sick to work and tells his boss he has contracted "anal glaucoma." When his boss inquires about the disease the man retorts: "It means I can't see my ass coming to work today!"

A pirate walks into a pirate bar (I guess they had those) and sees another pirate with a wooden leg, a hook for a hand and an eye patch. He asked how the pirate had met with such misfortune.

"Well (insert aaaargh here) I fell overboard and a shark took me leg," the pirate says. And the hand?, the pirate asks.
"Lost it in a sword fight (another aaaaaargh here) with another pirate," the pirate says.
"And the eye matey?," the other pirate asks.
"Aye, the eye, I was looking up at the sky and a seagull pooped in me eye," the pirate says.
"How would poop have taken your eye?," the inquiring pirate asked.
"First day with me new hook," the disabled pirate asks. (Insert laughing here).

Again, thanks to all (and a few new fans of the blog) for your kind hospitality. If I get a chance I'll do a little more show and tell about the California trip. For now I must unpack and begin to look for part-time work.

Putting the dead in deadlines

One of the great myths of newspaper journalism is how technology would speed up or improve the production of the newspaper.
As one who spanned several generations of new technology: Hot type, IBM Selectric (the worst type setting system every invented), crude computer word processors, ATEX and later Macs, the one that provided the greatest flexibility for updating and providing the freshest news in the newspaper was, ta-da, hot type.
Yes, the older technology allowed afternoon newspapers (the ones I'm familiar with) to update news and freshen its pages up to nearly noon (before I came around that deadline even extended into the early afternoon).
Now the dirty little secret is that after 8:30 a.m. at most afternoon papers there is little or no updating and for morning papers, the news is 8-10 hours old by the time it gets to your doorstep. Most of the news in your afternoon newspaper is from the previous day or the day before. If you don't believe me go to your newspaper's website and see what stories in the newspaper you received at home that day were on the paper's website early the day before. Sometimes the day before that.
Newsrooms now plan for Sunday front pages, weeks in advance. Long, boring features with beautiful stunning pictures now replace what in earlier days would be the breaking news of a Friday night or Saturday or a focused rehash of the major story of the week before.
But those long, boring features allow editors to layout the newspaper (editors love pretty pages) days in advance and then they pray that nothing major will happen that will make them cut a hole in their front page artwork to squeeze in a real news story for Sunday.
Often you will find major fires, fatalities or murders stuck in a page 2 hole or inside so as not to break up a potentially award-winning layout for an editor.
Newspapers would win back readers, especially to weekend papers if they would actually treat Saturday and Sunday like a regular news day.
The daily I worked for used to staff a regular reporter on Saturday and Sunday. The weekend shift was part of their regular responsibilities. They developed news sources and provided actual news for Sunday and Monday editions.
In later years, staff members were assigned to work on Saturday on a rotating basis, which didn't allow for the development of sources and the Sunday shift was sometimes used to punish a reporter that an editor wasn't particularly happy with.
More later on how editors rotate beats.

Free at last, I'm free at last

For 30 years I've chased police cars, ambulances, fire trucks and politicians during my newspaper reporting career.
With my retirement Dec. 1 I will finally be free of the stupidity of editorial meetings and decisions, but I will undoubtedly still have a hunger to write. Thus this blog, which will provide a meager outlet for me to reach family, friends and those stuck in the morass of daily reporting.
Feel free to weigh in, criticize, lambast, insult and denigrate, you will join a long line of folks who have already done so. The only difference is I won't get paid for it anymore.
I'm a Christian who believes in the Golden Rule, so I won't fire back.