Dear dimwit on the phone

Yes and no. I've seen some really good prep writers who can quote career stats for 100 different kids off the top of their head. No, I'm not that guy.

If you're a smaller paper and all you do is preps, it's probably something the beat person should know. Get that stuff from the coaches in the offseason and then update the tally as you go along.

But I certainly couldn't fault someone for NOT knowing, especially if they cover many different schools or are relatively new to the area.

 

Got a nasty email from a woman accusing us of not writing "one measly inch" about a labor dispute in our school district.

I replied, attaching three long articles on the issue from the past few months, but since she "reads the paper every day" and didn't see them, that wasn't good enough, and she said we should write another article.

She also claimed she worked at papers for years and knows how they work, whatever that's supposed to mean.

 

I'm at a small paper and did a football records project a few years back that I kept up with, so I can recite those off the top of my head or at least look them up.
But basketball? Fuck that noise.
It took me more than six months to do the football project, when I was only going through 50 or 60 games a year that were heavily reported and not scattered on every day of the week. I could spend the rest of my life researching our local basketball records and still not be accurate. And we only cover a handful of schools. In a bigger city where you might have 50 or 60 schools, playing as many as 40 0r 50 games a season -- each -- it's literally impossible to do on your own.

 

I have no idea how beat writers with lots of schools to cover keep track of all the significant milestones. I have had a couple of track and field kids going for major records, and I wrote everything down and kept it with me at meets just in case.

An AD e-mailed me last week about a swim coach who should get his 300th career victory before the season ends. He apologized for not knowing who covers swimming at my paper. I wrote about that same coach's 200th victory, so uh, really?

I guess even local ADs can't be bothered to read the paper anymore.

 

How often does your paper write about swimming? Same writer every time?

 

In a lot of states, there seems to be someone who keeps up with that stuff as a labor of love. In my state, there's a guy who keeps a web site with all of the state's playoff brackets and a lot of individual teams' win-loss records and results going back to the early 1980s. It's a tremendous resource. I know some other states, like Texas, have more exhaustive records that delve into individual accomplishments. Places like New York and Chicago are probably the same way for basketball.
The bad part is, a lot of it is on the honor system. There's absolutely no way to fact-check it. Maybe you can verify some of the more modern records or milestones, but how do you confirm what somebody in the 1950s or 60s did or didn't do over the course of three or four years without days of exhaustive research?

 

If we only had one or two schools, I could see this. We have 12. And we don't really have assigned beats, other than our one full-timer covering the in-town team. And as of Friday, the longest-tenured person on staff has been here a year.

 

Had a middle school parent just call me and threaten to sue me and my paper because, in a cutline of a photo featuring her son, the words "tries to grab a rebound" were used.

I tried telling her I wasn't responsible for the cutline, which there's nothing wrong with -- that's a phrase used quite a bit in other photos. But she kept going on and on about how I caused him to get made fun of at school today, never mind the fact that I didn't take the damn picture.

God, I hate parents sometimes.

 

Made fun of? He must not have grabbed the rebound. So he sucks. "Johnny Hoops fails miserably in his attempt to grab the rebound ..."

 

That's what Momma said. You can see the ball slipping out of his grip in the photo, and he is trying to grab the rebound. I get that he's a middle schooler, but none of us editing the pages last night saw anything wrong with "tries to grab a rebound."

 

Not a thing wrong with it. Could have said "goes for a rebound" or something generic, but if he's getting picked on for not getting a rebound in middle school, he's just a wimp or the kids don't like him anyway.

 

What would damages be in such a case? Give the fucking kid a Happy Meal and the mom a pacifier?