Re: So...
- From: "peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <racsspam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 15 Jul 2006 10:34:08 -0700
Ted Goldblatt wrote:
peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
It is unlikely that the company would object to someone working on a
novel after work, provided they are getting their normal work done.
However, a magazine (especially a literary mag rather than a news mag -
what type of material is in the mag Mike works on?) might consider an
employee using company resources to produce literary work not for the
magazine as being unacceptable. Of course, we have no reason to believe
they object.
Most newspapers and magazines have a kind of no-compete clause, or at
least an understanding, that you don't freelance to the competition,
but the details vary.
For instance, when I was working in Plattsburgh, our reporters --
particularly in the Lake Placid bureau -- often had work appear in
"Adirondack Life," which is a colorful regional monthly. Sometimes,
they were drawing on what they'd learned while reporting for the paper,
but, by the time it appeared, it was usually two or three months after
the fact and much more geared to trends and local history than to
breaking news.
OTOH, reporters at the bigs frequently write books about their work,
and I'm not sure what they go through to get clearance. Bob Woodruff is
a champion at turning his WashPo job into books and has been accused of
holding back information from the paper so it can be an exclusive in
his book -- this has brought him a lot of criticism but also some nice
wads of cash. Most reporters are not superstars and don't get this kind
of latitude.
I was just remarking to someone at work the other day that I remember
the publisher at my last paper staggering out to her car each night
with an armload of books and papers. Now, thanks to flash drives, you
can't tell who's taking work home and who's just gonna have a beer and
watch some TV. But most people at midlevel and above in a publishing
venture are putting in a lot of OT -- which stands for "own time" when
you're not hourly, which I'll bet Mike isn't.
As above, I assume this is expected (or at least common) in most
professional jobs. And in many/most of them (perhaps unlike the work
Mike does), freelancing of work that is closely aligned to the "real"
job isn't going to fly...
There's no way a novel would come under the no-compete rule. In fact,
as an editor, he might ruffle feathers by wanting to run a chapter in
the magazine, though that sort of thing happens.
As it happens, Joe Heller wrote most of "Catch-22" at Newsday,
apparently while he was supposed to be working on his paying job. By
the time this emerged, of course, he didn't need the job anymore
anyway. (He also never wrote anything that good again, either, but
that's another discussion.)
I suppose if that is a company laptop, there could be a rule about
using it for personal stuff -- more likely a "no surfing, no installing
software" rule rather than a "no writing irrelevant stuff" rule, but if
they wanted to get rid of him, they could probably use it to make a
case, especially if he were writing something they could claim was
embarrassing to the company.
<http://prfamerica.org/PornDisclosureSubjectsAPA2Ridicule.html>
Mike Peterson
Glens Falls NY
.
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