A Reporter’s Dilemma: the Carbon Copy Controversy

Here’s another story from my days as a newspaper reporter at the Piqua (OH) Daily Call, July 1978 through December 1979. The targeted boss in this tale of woe is the same “Larry” mentioned in BNTB #2, Behind the Scenes of a First Job: A Reporter’s Tale. The twist this time was that I let my disdain for my boss (even though earned it) get the better of me.

Larry (or possibly Rich, his boss, since Larry always used Rich’s name to back everything up) decided some of us weren’t carrying our weight and insisted we make carbon copies of everything we wrote, even the minor beat items we covered, like court filings and police and fire runs.

This was, of course, beofre the days of PCs and printers, in the days of typewriters, so there was extra work involved in doing carbon copies. We typed articles on odd lengths of blank newsprint the print room provided us with. So finding two sheets the same size as the carbon paper, sandwiching them all together and rolling them into our manual typewriters was a bit of a chore. Particularly on deadline.

What if your paper was longer than the carbon and you typed beyond its range to pick up? Well, you wouldn’t get credit for that, would you? How fair was that? And it’s hard sometimes to notice that stuff when you’re in the midst of creation with a deadline pressing down on you.

An unnecessary evil

Besides, Larry already received the originals of all the materials each of us wrote, reviewed them and marked them up before any of it went to the composing room. So he could clearly see, DAILY, what each of us produced. There were only eight of us, and we had specific beats–city, county, sports, education, daily living, outlying towns, etc. So he should have been able to LOOK at the paper each day and count up our column inches, right?

Right.

Everyone in the newsroom was insulted by this practice, but everyone went along with it anyway, except me. I refused, or at least partially refused. If I remember correctly, I did carbon my articles but not the court filings or police and fire calls. All the carbons went into a special basket in Larry’s office, where he could go through them later, re-review and record production levels.

When the ‘test period’ ended

I don’t remember how long we had to do the carbons–one month? Two? But after Larry tallied the results, he called me into his tiny, glassed-in office on one side of the newsroom, where he informed me, brusquely, that I was producing less than anyone else.

I thought that was a laugh because I had a byline nearly every day and front-page articles a few times every week. My beat, after all, was the city, which involved regular council meetings and city committee meetings, followups, crimes for which charges were filed, features, a weekly column, a Saturday local history feature, etc., etc., etc.

But I stopped laughing when Larry said that if I didn’t start doing “my share” I would be fired. Then he added, “Rich said so.”

Of course he did. I mean, of course Larry added “Rich said so.”

I tried to explain that he only had to look at the actual newspaper to know I did plenty, that I didn’t carbon everything, but he wasn’t listening.

Guess I shot myself in the foot on that one.

I admit it. BUT….

My thinking (that of a naive, sometimes know-it-all 23-year-old) was that it was his job to see who was working and who wasn’t, not our job to prove it to him. And couldn’t he tell by READING the paper? Couldn’t he tell by watching us work? Wasn’t that proof enough?

Shouldn’t he have known me well enough to realize something was amiss with my carbon-copy count and then asked me about it? Or saw clearly that the police, fire and court stuff was missing from my carbons? Or double-checked it against the paper itself? Couldn’t he have asked the news editor, Gloria, who knew I was a workhorse, what she thought?

He could have, and he should have, but he didn’t. But he was the boss, and he didn’t have to.

It would have been simpler and more accurate for him to go through the paper everyday and mark who had written what because the carbons could have been padded with stories that never made it in.

Why should we have to do his work for him anyway? I said that before, didn’t I? And okay, I get it. Same answer as before: He was the boss. And the whole exercise wasn’t about me showing him up.

I do, however, wish, at the time he announced this whole journey into redundancy, I would have asked if each of us could instead just mark up each issue and hand that in with our name on it. Typically all the local news would have been on one or two pages. Same with sports. So it wouldn’t have been all that tedious and certainly not as bulky as all those carbons.

And it would have been a better measure of what was actually printed. We could even have counted up the column inches FOR him instead of him counting lines on a typed page, since those inches were what really mattered.

I wish I’d said that. Nicely. Humbly. Deferentially, as if letting him think he thought of it himself.

I was never very good at that.

Hindsight is always 20-20, right?

I should have just slogged along with my peers. I wish I’d been more of a joiner. I wish I hadn’t been so stupid. I wish I wish I wish.

After all, nobody likes a know-it-all. I packed this experience in my bag of lessons learned and vowed when I became a boss I would do better. I hope I did.

Please use the comments to share…

Has a boss ever done something like this to you? How did you handle it?

& {sometimes} WHY