Me-first journalism: Jameis Winston style

I don't think the criticism comes from people who are envious of Matt's position. At least I'd hope it's not. I don't see this as "haters gonna hate" at all.

And some people have made legitimate points. My issue was that I think some people see "I" and "me" and automatically have a "this is self-indulgent" mentality. I don't think that's necessarily the case. A lot comes into play, including the writer's attitudes, where it's published and the point of the piece. I didn't see this as self-indulgent like I would a piece where it's a feature on a player and the writer includes something like, "While I was hanging out on Miami Beach with Lebron..." Self-indulgence to me is injecting yourself into a piece without a reason for it. As I said before, some readers would find this interesting.

One thing I find interesting about this, though, is that it raises the thought that maybe newspapers that publish magazines should consider being agnostic about where something is published in print when making decisions about how to approach a story. If you're going to put a piece in a monthly magazine that publishes with your paper, do you present it differently online than your other stories? Or do you go by the standard that you don't run it in the magazine if you wouldn't run it in the paper since readers won't distinguish between the two formats online?

 

Plenty of great writers write stories that do not go over well...

I can't even say this didn't go over well. Some of us, (including myself) didn't care for it, but the best writer who is a regular here, liked it, and Matt got a shout out in MMQB for the story.

You're never going to please everybody.

 

So, in essence, haters gonna hate.

 

Haters gonna hate...
Lovers gonna love...
I don't even want, none of the above...

 

And a number of us have received death threats from idiot fans, too.

 

One thing I don't get: you'd think the death threats would have subsided some by now, and this article just stirs it up all over again. ??

 

"One thing I don't get: you'd think the death threats would have subsided some by now, and this article just stirs it up all over again. ??"

...Vombatus, the story wasn't that bad.

 

Yeah, sadly, it's not that rare.

 

I can't say I ever did, fortunately, but I was never the main beat guy for a team with a very ... ahem ... passionate fanbase. I received my share of angry phone calls and threats to unsubscribe. Chilling stuff, let me tell ya.

Are any of these death threats occurring on lesser-known beats, like preps? Death threats to major college program beat writers, sadly, doesn't surprise me. Death threats to preps writers certainly would.

 

I would bet the majority of death threats come to college beat writers in the south. When I got death threats (Covering SEC) I was at the SEC Championship game and we were talking about it and probably half of the other writers had gotten a death threat and a couple where they thought they were being watched/stalked.

I got four death threats over an incident I had with a prominent football coach. Three of them were pretty straightforward. The other one, the guy called and repeated my daily schedule to me... and said. "One bullet and you don't make that 4:00 football practice." That freaked me out.

 

I've gotten two death threats over news coverage. The first was in college, the second was 15 years ago and was serious enough to warrant police report and extra patrols as it was from a well known to the cops crazy person.

Never for anything in sports.

We've had some reporters get death threats more recently, but it was always for news coverage.