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The Chronicle Work Credit Guidelines

(as of February 2007)

The main difficulty with trying to set work credit guidelines is that Chronicle committee members come and go. Sometimes an editor or a designer will only do one issue and then leave. No matter how clear the guidelines for work credits, therefore, there will always be a need for interpretation. As a relatively small committee in a volunteer organization, we should not try to adhere too closely to any particular work credit rules or we’ll drive ourselves crazy. What follow are suggested rules of thumb, most of which are being followed now; but they should be changed if they turn out to be unrealistic.

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Chronicle editors, proofreaders, designers, and copy editors receive an automatic monthly work credit of two hours per month. To be in one of these categories means that someone has edited, proofread, designed, or copy edited at least two out of the last eight issues.

Two other jobs qualify for automatic credit of two hours a month. The first is that of a secretary to the committee, who keeps documents and mailing lists up to date and sometimes prepares the minutes. (Often proofreaders, designers, or editors do these tasks, because there are not enough committee members to do them.) The other job is simply being an active member of the committee – defined as someone who comes to most of our meetings and who contributes time and energy to our discussions. Up until now such a person has been someone who writes or contributes illustrations on a fairly regular basis as well. The process for assigning automatic work credits to him or her is discussed below.

Writers and illustrators are not normally committee members, but if they choose to attend meetings regularly (see above), then they will get automatic work credit. Otherwise they get credit for hours worked on articles and illustrations, up to a maximum of four hours. For articles, a general rule is to receive two hours for each page (about 600 words). For illustrations the guidelines are quite flexible, depending on how much of the image is original art work or photographs. Often, of course, designers simply download images off the Internet. The editor, with the help of the designer, determines how many hours should be given to writers and illustrators for their work on each issue and forwards that information to the committee member who is the work credits coordinator.

The work credits coordinator’s job is to compile, every two months, who should be receiving automatic work credits on the Chronicle committee and how many hours of credit should be given to contributors to the current issue. Then he or she sends that compilation to the chroneveryone list to check for errors. The revised list is sent on to Marilou Lawrence, Karma’s membership secretary.