Weaver Newspapers Reviews

My first day, myself and 8 other new staff were given a script, the basic outline of the job, and within thirty minutes we were directed to desks and phones and told to start. A young woman who was very excited to start her first job out of high school was seated next to me. With little direction other than a script, she wasn't sure how to start. I attempted to talk her through it, and as she went to make her first call, she was abruptly sent home, and I was told to focus on the job lest I be next. This was the first signal that they were tough and didn't really care about employees. It was upsetting to watch. Weaver Newspapers collects local papers from all over the state and country, and calls businesses who have advertised in them to ask if they are interested in buying ad space in Senior Scene or Pink Book. If the business is interested, they scan the ad from the other local paper and paste it into theirs, that's why it was imperative not to mark the ad, if, for instance, the business declined. Which happened a lot, of course, but some of the criticism I received from businesses I had called weren't your regular outbound calling responses. Many people begged to be taken off lists, of which there are none. Others claimed they were done with Weaver media because they received no business from their ads, and had been jerked around by management at Weaver. Some even said that Weaver had ripped them off. I made call after call, until lunch when I finally got to talk to my new fellow employees. This is when I found out, none of these 20+ employees had been there longer than three weeks. I gleaned the only people had been there longer being the ones in management positions. By the end of my first day, I was unsure of whether I would be sticking around, but I came back for two more days. On my second day, I overheard a woman representing Pink Book discuss writing reviews for businesses. She told the business that if they pay a premium price they would make sure it wouldn't look like an ad. This is when their business finally made sense to me. These publications have no originality, and they follow no ethical standards. They word 'newspaper' in Weaver Newspapers, is a misnomer. I may have been naive, but I had assumed that in cornering such a market as the LGBTQIA community, that this was more than just a ploy for advertising sales by cishet capitalists. Over those three days I was promised continuously that they would be signing my employment paperwork by the end of the day. I never signed anything. By the third day, tired of the volatile management and the hostile way they would talk to staff, and the general dodginess of their operation, I decided to leave. I called multiple times over the following weeks to try to get paid for the three days I worked, but somehow this busy call centre would rarely answer incoming calls, or when I did get through, the phone would mysteriously disconnect. I honestly doubt anyone is making money off this venture other than the abusive managers. They advertise jobs all the time, in fact, with such a high turnover, I doubt they even take job ads down.