Great company - Home Delivery Staff (Paper Boy) The State Journal-Register Employee Review

Flexible with my schedule and timing

Little opportunity for growth / pay

Nice office building, friendly and committed co-workers, convenient downtown location in Springfield, IL., good employee parking. Also, journalism is fun.

1. It's print journalism, so it's difficult to move up within the company as a journalist. In fact, none of the journalists working at the SJ-R have had a raise in the past 10 years, not even for cost-of-living adjustments. 2. Office acoustics are bad — you can hear everything your neighboring co-workers are saying or eating. 3. Current management tends to side with corporate interests far more than with the workers in the building. So whenever the national company (Gatehouse) needs to enhance its bottom line, it's the low-level workers and journalists who take it on the chin. 4. Heavy workload. In the past 3 years, the SJ-R newsroom has lost 18 people and only replaced 4 of those positions. This has had two negative impacts: First, it has increased work responsibility on the few hardy journalists/photographers/editors who remain. Second, it has weakened the union, which workers formed in 2012 to secure basic protection from corporate abuse and neglect. The SJ-R still has a union, but it's largely toothless. 5. General low morale: This leads to cliques, a tattle-tale culture, some back-biting and passive-aggressive behavior from a few SJ-R "lifers" in the building. It can be a bit much to put up with when there's little hope of a raise or promotion.