Angry editor: How not to run a newsroom, Part Four. More experiences from my short time in Cambodia.
“The honour system,” the managing editor extolled more than once. “We don’t punch in on a clock here, so I trust you to keep track of your hours without one.”
This was more than a little disingenuous. The managing editor made it sound like there was a danger of his staff taking advantage of his good will. In reality, the punch clock would have been useful for the reporters, not the managing editor. It would have proved how much unpaid overtime they put in – hours and hours of it every day.
One of the things mentioned in the job ad that made the position attractive was that the workday would start at 7 a.m. and end at 4 p.m. This was repeated in the offered contract, which spelled out that the employee was entitled to a one-hour lunch break, so the workweek would be 40 hours long. Any overtime was to be requested with “reasonable notice” whenever possible and would be reimbursed with equivalent time off.
When writing or editing for a daily newspaper it is common to work shifts that start late and end late, often near midnight. That’s the nature of the news business since news happens at any time of the day and a paper gets “put to bed” – aka “sent to the printers” – late in the evening. The printing presses work through the night so that a fresh newspaper is ready to be left on doorsteps first thing in the morning.
There are benefits to such a schedule, since it can be nice to have your mornings free – you wake up late and enjoy a leisurely breakfast. However, it can be nice to have your evenings free instead – it definitely improves your social life. For this reason – among others – a move to online media seemed beneficial: Finish at four o’clock most days, except when the unscheduled nature of news made it necessary to work a bit longer.
That’s how it would have been had the job only entailed the gathering and editing of news. Unfortunately, it had a whole other aspect that the managing editor failed to mention before it was too late. In fact, the managing editor of this Cambodian website did not primarily need skilled professionals to produce original copy. His greater need was for grunt laborers to scour the internet, winnowing out and aggregating stories about nine of the 10 ASEAN countries (Brunei was not important enough in his mind) published by more reputable outfits. He would send these compilations to his subscribers to get them to click on his website.
What this meant for his employees (and himself as well, to be fair) were extremely long days. However, as was his wont, he made these requirements known in an oblique way.
“She,” he said one day early on, naming his longest-serving reporter, “likes to start at 6 a.m.” Afterwards, he added in such a way as to make it sound like a suggestion, so that if we would somehow be volunteering our time freely: “She usually gets some of it ready the night before, too.”
So I found myself with neither my mornings nor my evenings free. I started work before dawn and finished close to midnight five days per week, with staggered breaks stolen (or so it felt) throughout. It was not an eight-hour workday but a day that was 12 hours long or longer. Those four or more extra hours were never counted as overtime.
Deadlines were handled in the same misleading way. Newsrooms cannot properly without deadlines, but they need to be strict and clearly communicated. If an editor needs to publish a story on Tuesday he or she should, for example, give the reporter a Monday deadline. An editor should not keep changing the deadline without notice and then berate a reporter for not getting it done on time. An editor, in short, should not expect a reporter to be able to read his or her mind.
Yet that is exactly how the managing editor conducted his Phnom Penh operations, setting vague deadlines that seemed to change at a whim, viciously scolding his laborers if they were too late and sometimes, bizarrely, too early.
Already suffering chronic fatigue from the long hours and a lack of proper sleep, the mixed messages about deadlines and other things, coupled with immediate and loud recriminations for any transgression, served only to further demoralize the staff, diminishing their efficiency and their ability to produce their best work.
The news business is all about communicating information clearly, accurately and in a timely fashion. When the exchange of information within the newsroom is vague, misleading and haphazardly delivered, as in these examples, it is revealed in the quality of publication itself.
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