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Showing posts from April, 2014

The Newspaper Route, Part 3: Working for the Weekends

The work schedule for a sports journalist is not the easiest. Sporting events often occur at night, so we work nights. More sporting events occur on weekends, so we work weekends. The crazy schedule comes with the territory, and when I started in Madison at The Capital Times in 1995, I fully invaded that territory. The Cap Times was an afternoon paper, and for sports copy editors, that meant working early mornings. On good days, I started at 5:30 a.m.; on days I was supervising, I started a 4 a.m. But because we were an a.m. paper on Saturday mornings but we had to wait to typeset pages until after the Wisconsin State Journal, who we shared presses with, were off the floor, I worked Friday nights as well (about two of every three) often wouldn't be done until after 2 a.m. I'd get home and have about 48 hours to try getting 24 hours of sleep before I returned to work. Amid this nuttiness was the fact I had all of Saturday and all of Sunday off work. We didn't publish a S