Re: WBUR orgy

["Aaron 'Bishop' Read" <aread@speakeasy.net>]

Dave may answer differently since he's more on the evening crew, but all 
full-time day staff (which includes the Morning Edition crew thru the ATC 
crew) are required to help answer phones during pledge drives *unless* they 
are the crew manning the board during the actual begging period.  Used to 
be even the reporters and news staff were subject to this policy (again, 
unless they were currently on assignment) but I remember it getting to the 
point where they were almost always on assignment...and usually not because 
they were trying to get out of phone duty :-) ....that they were eventually 
exempted.   And management started "spreading the duty around" by assigning 
reporters to be part of the on-air begging trio to make up for it.   I know 
I always volunteered to engineer the WRNI side of fundraising becuase I 
hated answering the phones.  :-)

Part-time staff are asked to help, and will be given very dirty looks if 
they refuse, but the are not technically *required*.

This was when the "more news, less 
fundraising"/cram-it-all-into-one-hour-per-day system started up...but also 
when there was only four of those a year.  Now that there's more like eight 
per year, I dunno if the policy's changed.

It was a sad, sad day for the production department when the CE changed the 
phone system from a 60-phone hunt group (#1 rings, then #2, then #3) to a 
"next-available-phone-rings" system.   We production boys always managed to 
snag the last 10 phones in the hunt group and then just chatted over 
coffee...it was unusual (but not rare!) for the hunt group to fill up more 
than 50 phones.   ;-)

At 01:51 PM 1/25/2002 -0500, EM1 GITCHIER wrote:
>Dave,
>As a newshound, are you required to participate (other than what you may
>volunteer to do) in pledge drives?


______________________________________________
Aaron "Bishop" Read       aread@speakeasy.net
Fried Bagels Consulting   www.friedbagels.com
12 Walnut St. / Waltham, MA / 02453