Filed under: Adventure, Challenge, Events, Job Search, Journalism, News Industry, Sea Change
Well hey everybody. It’s been a month since I last posted. Part of that is because I’ve been busy at work, and part of it is because I’ve been lazy at blogging. Really lazy.
Obviously my big news is that I am on a list of 25-27 employees expected to be laid off by Oct. 24. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
The past month started out with some real promise. Steve Smith, former editor-in-chief of The Spokesman-Review, asked Brian Immel and me to kick off a big project. We were charged with taking the popular SportsLink blog and spinning it off into its own website, with the goal of making it profitable. That was going to be our job — I’d no longer be in the sports department.
The project got going slowly because Brian was busy working on the Spokesman’s yet-to-be-launched new website. So I continued my sports multimedia producer job. This included another new project, The Mike & Greg Show — a weekly video with two high-school sports reporters in which they make their game picks for the upcoming weekend. So far, we’ve done four episodes (1, 2, 3, 4).
Last Monday, Brian and I finally started having some good conversations on what we wanted to do with SportsLink. We wanted text-message updates, better play for videos, customizable home pages — we were even toying with the idea of making it a social networking site. (I know, it’s a dreaded term. There’s just no better one.)
Then came Wednesday, and everything came to a halt.
Layoffs. For me, out of the blue. I expected to get at least a little warning that layoffs might be coming. It was quite sudden — a morning e-mail announcing an all-staff meeting, rumors throughout the day, then the gauntlet came down.
Twenty-one union-covered newsroom employees were on the layoff list. Plus four to six managers. All said, 25 to 27 people gone from the newsroom. That’s about one-quarter of the staff. It’s devastating. Amid the turmoil, Steve also resigned. He had for months told people there wouldn’t be more layoffs under his watch. I’m glad he followed through.
The layoffs, as governed by an agreement between management and the union, must be done by inverse seniority. The majority of us on the list are 20-something journalists from all departments. Three of us are from sports. Wednesday night, a group of us gathered at Lisa’s and my place for some commiseration.
The next day, assistant managing editor Carla Savalli announced her resignation. And the exodus had started.
People have two weeks to submit voluntary resignations, which would help save the jobs of some of the people on the layoff list. I’m not holding out too much hope. And that gets me to, well, me.
When the news was announced, I didn’t know how to take it. I knew my name would be on that list; I’m the second-least-senior member of the sports staff. After Steve’s meeting, I immediately ducked out of the newsroom and headed home.
But now it’s sinking in. For the past few days, I’ve been working on getting my stuff together to send out job applications. Lisa graciously redesigned my résumé for me, I uploaded a few of my videos to Vimeo and I gathered together a bunch of print clips for my portfolio.
Really, I’ve started to see this as an exciting challenge, a chance to go somewhere else without feeling bad about leaving the Spokesman. I’m looking not just near my hometown Seattle, but elsewhere in the country. I’m not limiting myself to just print or just video, I’m broadening my scope. And, yes, that means broadening my scope past newspapers — though that’s where the majority of my searching has taken me.
I will soon make a new page for this website to function as a sort of video portfolio. And I may start putting up some print clips. But this means I may hide the blog for a little bit, to keep it out of the eyes of potential employers. I don’t think there’s anything that could hurt my chances here, but it’s not worth the risk. If I hide the blog, I’ll be sure to tell you all how to access it.
In the meantime, thanks to those of you who have called or texted me to check in. I’ll keep everyone posted.
We still don’t have a name. We’ve been called the “Gang of Eight” by S-R EIC Steve Smith in his blog. Perhaps we’re the “Great Eight,” as S-R videojournalist Colin Mulvany wrote. We’ve referred to ourselves as “Team Fix Newspapers for Ever and Ever” (the name is just a little tongue-in-cheek), the “Young Turks” or “NeRD” (Newsroom Reinvention Division).
Our task, assigned to us by Steve, is to take a tabula rasa and reinvent how the Spokesman-Review newsroom is structured, because the current system “no longer works,” as he said. I’ve tried to explain it here. Another team member, Andrew Zahler, has written about it in his blog. Mindy McAdams has referenced our project on her blog, “Teaching Online Journalism.”
Andrew summed it all up nicely:
This is exciting and scary as hell.
OK. But what the heck are we doing?
Simply put, we’ve been talking. A lot. We met for a few hours Monday and Tuesday. When we really started getting into things, we spent five hours Wednesday and six hours Thursday in the S-R’s editorial conference room. We’ve mapped out how each department currently functions and identified problem spots. We’ve thrown out small ideas and gotten giant overhauls off our chests.
Who are we, based on job title?
- Online producer (former copy editor)
- Business/city desk reporter
- Photographer
- GA multimedia producer/online developer (former photographer)
- Editorial assistant
- Night-side news copy editor
- Sports copy editor/alternative weekly designer
- Sports multimedia producer/sports reporter (former city desk reporter)
It’s a well-rounded group, but it’s not possible to get every viewpoint in the newsroom (which is precisely why we’ve opened up the floor to everybody). And, because we’re not looking to operate in a Cone of Silence, I wouldn’t mind hearing any more ideas.
I have a job for you: Reinvent how a newspaper functions.
Sound easy? Maybe you already have ideas on how to restructure a newsroom and streamline the work flow. Can you come up with a complete proposal in 11 days?
That’s what my editor, Steve Smith, has asked me and seven other young journalists to do. We are charged to take a blank sheet of paper and come up with a way to make the Spokesman newsroom efficient while completing all if its objectives. The eight of us are meeting every day, often for several hours at a time, to work through this process.
It’s more complicated than you might think. We have a few limitations — we can’t eliminate the print product, we can’t eliminate the new radio initiative, we can’t eliminate the community-oriented Voice sections, we can’t suggest layoffs. And so far, after two days of two-hour meetings, we have made it through just three departments (photo, news and sports) simply to see how the process currently works and identify problem areas (which are basically everywhere).
Our goal, as I understand it, is to come to Steve with a report by 5 p.m. July 10. He may or may not eventually implement our recommendations (we can have many), but he has promised to take them seriously.
There is skepticism and fear in the newsroom, of course. Many veteran Spokesman employees don’t like that Steve has selected eight young journalists and put some responsibility of the future of the newspaper into our hands. We don’t have the experience, they say. Steve sees it the opposite: We don’t have a stake in how newspapers have operated for 150 years, we don’t have a stake in who is in what editor position, we don’t really even have a stake in how the newsroom is currently structured.
As Steve has said, the current structure no longer works. A strengthening focus on the web coupled with layoffs in the fall has put the traditional newsroom in disarray.
Colin Mulvany, our multimedia director, has a post on his blog about Steve’s announcement yesterday of this initiative — along with what else Steve said about the future of the Spokesman. (In short, things are bad but, relatively, not as bad as other newspapers in the country. Layoffs are not needed now but might be come fall, when the company budgets for 2009.)
Until we submit our ideas, I can’t talk much about the project. It’s not a secret, by any means, but we are asked to keep our actual recommendations to ourselves. Until then, the Young Turks, as we have called ourselves — or Team Fix Newspapers for Ever and Ever, or the Great Eight — will be plugging along drafting the future of The Spokesman-Review.
I received an unfortunate phone call from my editor at 8 o’clock this morning — Glenn Johnson, to whom I usually give the title “everything ever,” was in the hospital for “stroke-like symptoms.”
Bummed, but assigned a breaking-news article (woohoo!), I dragged my only-four-hours-of-sleep self out of bed and into the shower. I was kind of out of it, and still didn’t even know where to start calling once I sat down to work.
So, I called City Hall. (What a marvelous idea!) They gave me info. I also had an AP brief and a few internal WSU e-mails to work with.
I quickly wrote up a long-ish brief and posted it online — on the SportsLink blog and in the Spokesman’s breaking-news headlines. Lisa — I had called her while shaving to alert her — rang me up to tell me we both got done with the quick briefs at the same time.
I won’t bore you with the standard reporting stuff. (I got stonewalled at Pullman Regional Hospital, had a pleasant conversation with City Supervisor John Sherman and stole four minutes of Erica Austin’s time — wherein she took the opportunity to relate Johnson’s incident to how much the Murrow School needs to be the Murrow College, because they don’t want to overwork their staffers. I, uh, didn’t use that in my article.)
But if there’s one thing I’m proud of about my reporting today, it was my frustrating quest to figure out Johnson’s current age.
No one knew, and everyone said they probably wouldn’t be able to tell me anyway because of privacy laws. (Yeah, right.) None of the other news outlets had his age — mostly because the AP completely ripped off my online brief (or used it because of a contract with the Spokesman).
I started searching the internet with the intention of cross-checking bios to deduce an age. But try Googling Glenn. You get surprisingly few results of substance. I tried everything from “glenn johnson” to “glenn johnson mayor pullman wsu bio” to “karen doke 1996 glenn johnson kathryn obituary” — the latter a failed attempt to find any mention of his daughter’s death in a car accident that might give me his age in 1996.
Then I remembered one of those crazy tricks we learned in journalism class: online voter registration databases.
I found the Washington one, searched “Johnson, Glenn” and — by God — there he was. He was born Jan. 10, 1944. He’s 64.
I rule.
————
Here’s my finished article and blog post.
Get better soon, Glenn.
As far as I can tell, my Suburban is now fixed.
I got an intake valve replaced Wednesday to fix the leak that had coolant bubbling out of my engine block. Because I gave them so much money the other day, and because they didn’t think the valve would need to be replaced, they gave me a flat rate of $300 to finish up the work. After tax, I paid $323.
That brings my total for this round of repairs up to $1,074.
If you take the perspective that I traded my parents a can of Cougar Gold for the Beast (yes, there’s a story there), $1,074 for a car doesn’t seem that much. Also, the original $751 was for repairs my car needed anyway.
In December, mechanics at a shop in Spokane told me I would need to replace my radiator soon. I gambled and stretched my old one as long as I could. Presumably, my car’s subsequent overheating this past weekend blew the intake valve in the engine. So, one could argue that my gambling cost me $323.
That’s better than most people’s trips to Las Vegas. (Or is it Los Vegas?)
EDIT: Oh, the story about the Cougar Gold.
When I was home in Seattle this winter, my step-dad, Brad, signed the Beast’s title over into my name. The idea was they were just giving it to me, which was awesome. However, the cost of a new title was $20, which I didn’t have when Brad and I were at the licensing place.
I had just brought him a can of Cougar Gold from Pullman. Those cost about $22. So, I didn’t pay him back for the $20 title, and he didn’t pay me back for the cheese.
I traded a can of Cougar Gold for my Suburban.
I lied.
I got home tonight, got out of the Beast, and steam was billowing out of the hood.
Not fixed.
It turns out, coolant is indeed leaking out of the engine block, precisely where it was the other day. Imagine that! Jerry’s Auto Repair was wrong.
At least the engine wasn’t overheating. It was just leaking water and, hence, steam. The temperature gauge said it was a-OK all the way home.
So, it looks like I’ll be spending that extra $350. Gotta take the Suburban back into the shop Wednesday and keep this saga going.
Goddammit.
The leak. Notice it’s in the engine. Not good.
A surprising development in the saga of my Suburban: The shop finished work on it early and found the engine block is not leaking.
So, I have my car back and in good condition again. The mechanics said nothing else is seriously wrong with it — just the stuff I know about, the A/C and the parking brake.
In all, replacing the radiator, flushing the transmission fluid and changing the oil came to $751. No small change, but not as bad as I foresaw. I put it on my Alaska Airlines Visa. Some good miles.
I heard back from the mechanics working on the Beast, and the expenses will be high but manageable.
- $550 — Replacing the radiator.
- $200 — Flushing out and replacing the transmission fluid.
- $25 — Oil change. I might as well; it’s at the shop.
- $350 — IF NEEDED, replacing a head gasket if the engine block indeed is leaking coolant.
Yeah, it sucks, but there’s no alternative. It’s not like I can sell the car with all this stuff broken on it. Oh, also, the radiator work should fix the heating problem — but, obviously, not the busted air conditioner.
Jerry’s Auto Repair should be done with the first phase about 1 p.m. Tuesday. If the mechanics pressure-test the Suburban again and find the engine block is indeed leaking, that’s where the extra $350 come in.
I’ll keep y’all posted. I know you’re on the edge of your seats.
What’s happening to us, Jacob?
First, Jake’s old, reliable (really?) ‘66 Tempest broke down a few weeks ago. Now it’s my ‘88 Suburban’s turn.
On Saturday, my truck started overheating. Pretty bad. The temperature gauge was reaching way past the “oh crap” point and the radiator was steaming and smelling like hot coolant.
So on Sunday, I poured more engine coolant in. Not enough. I added another gallon of water. Perfect.
I turned the engine on and green water started bubbling out of the engine block, near the intake manifold. NOT A GOOD SIGN. That’s, uh, not just your average $200 brakes fix.
That’s what I did on Wednesday. I took my Beast to Les Schwab (I didn’t get any free beef) to get my brake pads fixed. Of course, as soon as I fix something on my car, something way worse goes wrong.
So today my Suburban is in the shop. I’m crossing my fingers the damage isn’t too bad. Hopefully just a couple-hundred dollars.
With this new issue, here’s what’s currently wrong with my truck — which only has 123,000 miles on it:
- The radiator is shot (it seems).
- Something is wrong with the transmission, some Spokane mechanic told me.
- The air conditioner is busted and, hence, disconnected.
- I think the rest of the air system is wonky — doesn’t warm up.
- Needs an oil change (which is easy).
- The parking break doesn’t work (and hasn’t for seven years).
- Probably some other horrible stuff.
DENVER — For as little as I did today, it seemed like a lot. Mostly because my main purpose for being here — video — was threatened big-time.
Of course, I packed my camcorder (plus accessories) and my tripod down to Denver. I need it, right? I’m doing post-game video and whatever other random multimedia stuff I decide to do. (more…)
