what's cooking?

Technodweeb is alive and well. I seem to be in a bit of a “round robin” with the editors over at the Saddleback News.

Saddleback News is an affiliate of the OC Register-where I’m on contract with the OC Moms section. For the affiliate I write a monthly column called My Laguna Hills.

It WAS pretty popular with the locals-until the newspaper changed to Pluck. Pluck is not fun. I use it when I post on Lady’s Home Journal (I’m one of their bloggers). it’s easy enough to use-even for me, so I was a bit surprised when one of my editors told me I was not posting my column right.

Hmmm. I called both of the new IT women. One told me she saw nothing wrong, that as long as it was in blog form, that one of them would simply pull it and put it into the column area for both the online and print paper.

So far, that hasn’t happened! I’ve had several people send me personal messages asking why I’m not doing my column anymore! I wrote back saying I most certainly was writing them and even gave them the links.

My bad-I took the links, but didn’t check them out until my other editor asked me why my column was in the blog area. I explained what I had been told and she told me “No Carine, they were supposed to teach you how to post the column, not a blog. Please tell them what I need.”

You bet I did-I copy/pasted her note to be, sent another e-mail with my desire to have this taken care of and reported to them what I found when I clicked on my own link.

This is what I found-you click on the link and the darn thing takes the viewer to my personal page at the newspaper, where you have to click on the area that says “blog”. About 2 more clicks and you’re finally at my column!

I pointed out that my readership is frustrated and my numbers are down because of all these moves and that not one of my stories has made it to the print edition in the last 3 months.

The frustrating part is that I feel that somehow this is my fault. In reality-it is the fault of Pluck. I do find that this time I won’t be willing to apologize for my lack of computer skills, since one of the editors has no idea why this is happening.
If she and the other editor don’t understand what’s going on and they’re getting the “big bucks”-how can I, lowly underpaid columnist, know what to do?


I suppose it’s all relative, I get paid for this gig (hold on, I’m even willing to part with this information, I get a whopping $60 a column), so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.

Really though-in this day and age, something as simple as posting one measly 500 word story shouldn’t take 2 IT specialists, 2 editors and 1 writer. Or should it?