Black Rock Beacon, Volume II -- Now Hiring

[Mitch]

Greetings Burnalists!

It’s time for Volume II of the Black Rock Beacon, Burning Man’s source for news, views, photos, and, butt of course, strained references to processed pork products.

Having survived our first year, we’re ready to make our good paper great, with better content, tighter writing, improved graphics and production equipment, and, we hope, a more interactive theme camp that will make the rest of Black Rock City seem dull as dishwater.

Now, all ofthis doesn’t come just by talking about it. To be is to do, as Kant said. (Lao Tzu said “to do is to be.” Frank Sinatra said “Do be do be do.”) We need to significantly expand our staff at all levels. We also need to raise a bit of money, so if you find $20 burning a hole (heh, I said “burning”) in your pocket, by all means PayPal it to us via the website: www.blackrockbeacon.org

So, you ask, what can YOU do for your newspaper? Well, we always need reporters, we’re as real as a Burning Man newspaper can be, and we dig up the facts that our readers love to assimilate when they wake up and smell the coffee. We’re putting info on the website NOW, and that’s important, we want to drive readers to the website where they might well pony up those all-so-important donations. There ARE assignments available, and the website is a place where you can spin some well-written opinion pieces if you aspire to be an on-Playa columnist (an affliction that seems to affect 99.44 percent of all Burners). We have assignments available for the Playa papers as well, obviously there’s no great rush, but even for items written at Burning Man, there is often some research you can do while you still have Internet access and telephones and such.

But we’re more than just a bunch of reporters. We have leadership positions that must be filled if we are going to have a newspaper. Outside of the news department, these include:

-Theme Camp Manager
-LNT Director
-Operations Manager
-Volunteer Coordinator
-Fund Raiser
-Paginators (at least 3)
-Printer’s Devils (at least 6)
-Delivery People (squizillions)

See below for job descriptions.

In the news operation itself, we have several important job openings. Most of them do NOT require extensive newspaper experience, but what we really, really, really do need is for people who commit to doing them to follow through. It’s not like we can call a temp agency and have them send somebody along when you don’t show...


-Managing Editor(s)
-Day Editors
-Assistant News Editors
-City Desk Editors
-Photogaphers
-Photo Wranglers
-Illustrators
-Copy Editors
-Web Editor

Here are the descriptions of the news department jobs, the others are described below.


-Managing Editor (1 or 2, or a Managing Editor and an Assistant Managing Editor): A marquee job and a real chance to put your stamp on the Beacon. The Managing Editor(s) keep(s) the legendary Master List of Articles in Development, the assignments that turn into the articles that make the Beacon more than just yellowish paper with black dots all over it. The Managing Editor(z) work(z) with the reporters and writers to shape their assignments into terse, witty, porcine prose. This position, assuming a single Managing Editor, requires an average of 4 hours a week pre-playa, scaling up from about 1 hour in the spring to 10 or so as we prepare the Gate edition and for departure to the playa. On-playa, the Managing Editor could reasonably expect to work 5 hours a day.

-Day Editors (4 or 5). Supporting the Managing Editor(i), each Day Editor is responsible for one issue of the Beacon. While the Managing Editor(en) keep the MLAD, the Day Editors each maintain the daily assignment sheet, showing which items are slated to appear that day. The Day Editors also keep tabs on what was supposed to run and DIDN’T so that the next day’s Day Editor knows what was overheld. This position requires less than an hour of work each week pre-playa and at least 8 hours (during one day) on the Playa.

-Assistant News Editors (2). These are reporter/editor positions, reporting to our News Editor. One A.N.E. will be the point person for contacts with Law Enforcement and Media Mecca on the Playa. This person will make daily trips to the police enclave, to Media Mecca, and, as needed to the Ranger stations and Medical tent to find out what is up. The other A.N.E. should be a San Francisco-based person who will cover developments in the Burning Man Organization. Think of it as walking through a Borg cube and hoping they don’t notice that you’re taking notes, which is more or less what you’ll be doing (but if you want to use a tricorder, you’ll have to get your own, and we are NOT paying for your Vulcan ear extensions). The A.N.E. for legal affairs will work about 4 hours a day on the Playa, with little pre-playa obligation. The A.N.E. for Bmorg affairs will work 2 or 3 hours a week pre-Playa and a few hours on the Playa. While these editors will generate story ideas, they need not write all of the articles.

-City Desk Editors (10-12 3-hour shifts). A bit of a misnomer, our City Desk is the human face of the Black Rock Beacon. From the crack of dawn (say 11 a.m.) until deepest darkest night (5 p.m. or whenever they feel like leaving), the City Desk editors meet and greet Burners, hand them newspapers, collect their schwag and talk to people who come running up with story ideas. The latter role is important, you have to decide if the person who says he just saw George Bush at Jiffy Lube is a lunatic or just an extortionist. Working with the Day Editor, the City editors are the “front end” of the on-Playa editorial process. It’s a good way to get a feeling for the Beacon. Depending on where our camp is located, we might want to put a satellite City Desk at Center Camp or in the Cafe.

-Photographers. We’ll have a few photographer openings. Photogs scurry about the Playa, capturing images to go with our articles as well as those weird and wonderful bits of wild art that make Playa Life worth living. Note: only digital photos are acceptable. Where do you think you are? Time commitments vary.

-Photo Wranglers. (5 shifts) The wrangler dudes help the photogs get their pixels into our Motley Crue of Playamacs. You need to have a bit of computer savvy (and if you know Photoshop, so much the better). It’s about a 5-hour commitment each day.

-Illustrators. All photos are art but not all art is photos. We need one or two people who can do line drawings. If you think you should have a daily comic strip, convince us, maybe you will.

-Copy Editors (2 or 3 per day). Copy Editors are our first line of defense against bad juju. Even though we’re at Black Rock City, libel laws still apply, so we need to read our stories over and make sure they’re fair and accurate (unless, of course, they refer to something that can be processed into bacon, in which case they only have to be accurate). A good job for people who like to write, hang out at newspapers, and who want to learn about the workings of the Beacon. It’s also not a bad way to get a feel for editing if you want to do it professionally. Shifts run from about 1 to 5 hours, mostly in the evenings.

-Web Editor. It’s all the way at the bottom, but it’s an important job. We need an editor to solicit and process articles for our website, with help from other editors. Kind of like being the managing editor for the pre-Playa Beacon. It would be nice if we could put a new article up on the site every day, so figure the job would be five hours a week (max) pre-Playa.


Production positions:

-Paginators: We need at least 3 people to help lay out our newspaper. We use Quark Express on System 9ish Macs, so we’re primarily looking for people who know how to use that, though if you’re a whiz with InDesign you can probably figure it out. This is a night job, it starts at 6 or 7 and ends around midnight. If you’ve done it in the past for the Gazette, then we DEFINITELY want you!

-Printer’s Devils (6 or more) The Beacon is printed on our cool duplicator that we bought pretty much out of our own pockets. To keep it cool, we do this in the dark of night, inside a hermetically sealed (well, cleanish) van. You get ink on your hands, you’re the first to see the paper, and we can teach you how to do this pretty quickly. This is an excellent way for somebody who thinks journalists are idiots and would-be Burning Man journalists are pretentious twits to volunteer for the paper without compromising their ethics. It takes about 4 hours to print the Beacon, and we’d like to split the shifts, so figure a minimum commitment of 2 hours.

-Delivery Specialists. Finally, as dawn breaks over Black Rock City, our Deliverance department brings the Beacon right into people’s tents. Whether they want it or not. And they play the banjo. Okay, they don’t play the banjo, and many of them have teeth, but you get the idea. This is a great job if you like to get schwag, because nothing pleases Burners more than to have people wait on them hand and foot. These are early-morning jobs that begin around sunrise (no, really) and run 1 or 2 hours.

Finally, we have these positions that are outside of the newspaper. This is our weakest link, staffingwise (so the dork who wrote this memo put it at the bottom), and therefore the place where you could make the biggest difference.

-Theme Camp Manager (and assistants). Last year we had lots of stuff to worry about, and our camp, though cozy, largely resembled a parking lot. This year, we’d like to do a lot better and be more interactive, day and night, not only because it’s the Right Thing to Do but because it’ll bolster our case for getting good placement. As Theme Camp Manager, you can put your stamp on this process. We do have a proto-idea for a theme, formulated around our famous Playa Shack, but if you’re the kind of person who has done this before, we won’t saddle you with our preconceptions (though we’re probably gonna want that shack somewhere!) The Camp Manager will handle the application for placement, lay out the camp, develop the theme, arrive early, leave late, test the bacon, and earn out undying gratitude for spending a lot of time at camp, especially at the start and end of the week. It’s super important that we fill this position soon.

-Operations Manager. The Operations Manager is the Managing Editor of the Beacon organization. This person’s job is to understand what all the department heads are doing and make sure we’re not working at cross purposes. The O.M. also must take responsibility for things that otherwise might fall between the cracks, like making sure we have the right extension cords. It will require just one or two hours a week pre-Playa and then one or two hours a day at BRC.

-LNT Director. Working closely with the Theme Camp Manager and the Operations manager, the LNT director will create a Leave No Trace plan and make sure that it’s carried out. This person will be among the last to leave, so if you want to stay in BRC for a few extra days, this is a good way to do it. It’s also a good job for somebody with a truck or other large-ish vehicle, because you’ll have to haul the last loads.

-Volunteer Coordinator. Another position that must be filled as close to immediately as can be. The Volunteer Coordinator will greet new volunteers (either on Tribe or ePlaya or via email) and create a database of who we are. The VC will also schedule the City Desk and Copy Editors and the Paginators and Printer’s Devils.

-Fund Raiser. Lastest but not leastest. We need somebody who can go out and get us some money. There could be thousands of dollars of foundations grants with our name on them, but how will we know unless we look? The Fund Raiser will also devise gimmicks like our vaunted (if not particularly successful) Breakfast in Bed With a Playa Hottie raffle.

To apply for any of these jobs: Join us on the Tribe.net bulletin board system at http://theblackrockbeacon.tribe.net or send an email to questions[at]blackrockbeacon.org

[Mitch]

Ooops...I was a bit out of date on the highly important Paginators description. It SHOULD read:

-Paginators: We need at least 3 people to help lay out our newspaper. We use InDesign on System OSX Macs, so we’re primarily looking for people who know how to use that, though if you’re a whiz with Quark you can probably figure it out. This is a night job, it starts at 6 or 7 and ends around midnight. If you’ve done it in the past for the Gazette, then we DEFINITELY want you!