HR Issues

It's been called an industry standard, the norm, an average and a rule of thumb. It's also been called a myth, folklore and flat-out wrong. Yet it's often cited--even if it's being derided--and widely known by most in the newspaper business. What is it? The infamous staffing benchmark that says a paper should have one newsroom employee for every 1,000 in circulation. Most of you know of it. In my...

Ron Recinto had been toiling at daily newspapers for more than 10 years when an old friend called him up to lure him away from the world of crackling police scanners, city budgets and agate type. It was September 2000, the tail end of the Internet boom, and Recinto, now 36, was an editor at the State in Columbia, South Carolina. He loved his job, he cherished newspapers and he had no plans to...

You may as well get used to mistakes like those in that headline. If the résumés and cover letters that have come across my desk in the past year are any indication, we, the print media, are doomed. I have advertised four open editorial positions for my sports-related trade magazine in the past sixteen months. Every day during my search for qualified candidates, I'd open my mail with a quiver of...