Pros
Flexible schedule: I enjoyed working the afternoon shift and having weekdays off. I could take care of business (doctor's appointments, attend graduate school, interview for other jobs) while not having to take off personal time. Fewer work distractions: Most of my work week was on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which meant fewer people in the office to interrupt my work with chatter and other organizational drama.
Cons
No future: The company (and to a large degree, the newspaper publishing industry) is on its deathbed because of incompetent management and lack of vision. Instead of looking at the internet as a mass communications medium, old-school newspaper leaders looked at it as a novelty. Now the industry is far behind and has let other platforms emerge as news sources with large audiences and revenue. Moreover, many of the old-school leaders who had such poor vision either retired or still hold these positions and think they can salvage the industry. Lack of diversity: The field is 90 percent white and its editors are 95 percent white (90 percent white male), even though the United States. As a black male with master's degrees in publishing and integrated marketing communications, I knew I had no opportunities in the field. The industry has received criticism for its lack of diversity for decades, and nothing has changed. Poor pay: Many of the copy editors and page designers were making less than $30,000 per year, which are poverty wages for a college graduate. The company then started hiring people with no journalism experience to be copy editors and page designers, naturally with errors appearing in all of the content. No telecommuting: The job is practically a virtual position, where the copy editors and page designers work on publications electronically produced in six other states. However, they all had to drive to the hub to work on the publications, even though some of them had a commute of 90 minutes to and from work. There literally is no interaction at the workplace. The editors at other papers emailed their budgets and stories, the copy editors and page designers worked on the sections in Adobe InDesign, sent proofs via email and then upload the pages though File Transfer Protocol. By letting people telecommute, the company could save a lot in overhead, recruit a wider range of candidates, and basically give employees a raise by lowering their costs of going to work. I remember asking the division heads why these people could not telecommute, and they looked confused and could not come up with a logical response. One person said, "We don't like people working across long distance from the workplace," even though, for example, a person was editing an designing a magazine for a publication in Alabama. I told them their real reason against telecommuting was that they wanted to micromanage people and they didn't want to admit it.