Daysleeper

I'm the screen, the blinding light

I'm the screen, I work at night

I see today with a newsprint fray
My night is colored headache grey
Don't wake me with so much
Daysleeper

— REM, "Daysleeper"

I like my job, really. I like what I do, and I'm good at it. But the hours suck.

Fortunately, I have a plan.

I work for a morning paper. That means, for most of us, working nights. Deadlines are set as late as possible to accommodate as much of the day's news as possible while still being early enough to print all the papers, load them into a fleet of trucks and vans and station wagons and get them to the paper carriers in time for them to get them onto subscribers' porches by 7 a.m.

I post the paper online, a task that can't be done until the newsdesk is finished putting the next day's edition together.* So in other words, I work late. In the morning rush hour, I'm heading home.

But it doesn't have to be that way. With the proper setup, Web-based technology would allow me to do 99 percent of my job from home. That would eliminate the commute, but it wouldn't change the hours.

So here's my plan: I convince my boss to spring for a state-of-the-art broadband hookup in my new apartment … in Auckland, New Zealand.

Voila — I'd be workin' the day shift. Choice.

(Alternate plan: We work out some kind of exchange with The New Zealand Herald wherein I post their site from here in Pennsylvania and the poor bastard now working their online overnight switches to a day shift, posting our East Coast newspaper's site.)

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* Yes, it sounds crazy, but this is how it works for most papers. Stories are cut to fit the print edition, heds are written to fit column widths, all of the content is shaped to fit the page. Then you run a program to rip the content off of the page and reassemble it for the Web. We have increasingly sophisticated programs for lifting content from the page and converting it into Web pages, but it's still a retrofitting that makes little sense, process-wise, and which means that most online newspapers are simply html transliterations of the print editions that fail to take advantage of the Web's lack of space constraints or the possibilities of hypertext.