Exhausting

So I’ve spent most of today working on uploading the week’s content for the Whitman Pioneer. The paper prints on Thursday mornings and is distributed at noon so we (read: I) work on getting all of the content on the web by the time the print issues hit campus. Since I’m the web department this means my morning looks roughly like this:

  • 8 a.m. get into the office and start uploading content
  • 10 a.m. go to Politics and Religion
  • 11 a.m. get back to the office and finish uploading regular news articles
  • 1 p.m. go to work at the Multimedia Development Lab and upload the photo gallery and featured articles for that week
  • 2:30 p.m. go to Decolonization in Africa
  • 4 p.m. work for about an hour making sure all the little things are done

 

To me this just seems to be a crazy amount of time to spend uploading the content for what is essentially a 28 page print paper; however, I haven’t been able to find a better way of doing it. After working for the last month or so with the Whitman Pioneer on the website redesign and then the launch this semester I can see how people could get pretty burned out of journalism after years in the business. If this were my routine on a daily basis it would get pretty old pretty quickly. With all that said it’s also exhilarating to work on a newspaper staff and to have a role in the content that’s produced and distributed. It’s all been a whirlwind of a month and it’s exciting to be working with a paper that has the resources and motivation to truly expand the site and web presence.

Comments

Daniel says:

Can’t you work the content-shoveling step into the editors’ workflow?

Andrew says:

The production assistants have offered to do some of the content-shoveling, but from what I hear about last semester that resulted in a lot of mistakes. I think I’d be happier to deal with the copy and paste than have to deal with the mistakes that others make.

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