Groundout wrote:
Thanks for the advice; I like the idea of having lazy weeks instead of crazed rushes every night. Staffing is a real problem at my paper; one person calls out sick and the dominoes start falling.
Those of you who've switched from newspapers: D'you miss the energy, assuming there's a less-crazed pace at the mag? D'you miss not being on breaking news stories? I think I would miss these things, but then again, there are so many frustrating things driving me mad right now that I would hope the trade-off is worth it. But I'm a newspaperman born and bred; close to 30 years in the business. This would be a wrench, I'm sure.
I went from a daily paper to a monthly magazine almost 20 years ago, and have since switched from editing magazines to editing books. I can't say I miss the often-crazy atmosphere (especially at deadline), but I can definitely say that my experience at a daily paper made me a much better writer and editor. After facing a daily newspaper deadline, magazine deadlines didn't seem daunting.
None of my magazines had what others have described as "lazy weeks." Although the magazine comes out once a month, there was a deadline of some sort almost every day, and I found the work tended to spread itself out quite evenly over the month. The thing I liked the most about switching from a newspaper to a magazine was that, in my case at least, my hours became fairly normal (roughly 8 to 5, five days a week, instead of 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 p.m. to 1 or 2 a.m., five or six days a week on the sports desk). In fact, it took me a few months to get used to being able to walk out of the office at 5 p.m. and realize that I could do whatever I wanted in the evening.