Dear dimwit on the phone

Sweet...this guy equates us with ISIS I guess:
"In one of the great rivalries in college sports the Army Navy game was played for the 116th time this past Saturday. As the only major college football game played on that day millions watched on TV while millions more, including servicemen around the world, listened. Every man or woman who has ever served in the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps has a stake in that game. Radio and TV stations talked about this game for the week prior and even ESPN's College Game Day saw fit to be there. Navy's QB as it turned out ended up 5th in the voting for the Heisman Trophy. Every one of these players from this game will have a commitment to military service ranging from four to eight years. How did your paper see fit to honor that game? Buried it on Page 7 of the sports page. Way to support your military."

Yeah, sorry man...you know that Heisman thing on the cover, high school basketball on 2, Outdoors columnist who is ALWAYS on 3 and the double-truck of college hoops on 4-5 should get moved around for a game that YOU care about. (Page 6 was a full-page ad)
'Murica!

 

We had a guy call up tonight wanting us to ship him a dog two states over.

 

I had 2 1/2 pages for that Sunday and a lot of local stuff I had to get in. I didn't even run Army-Navy as a brief. Surprised I didn't get any complaints.

 

Should have strung him along to see how much money you can get out of him. I hear a paper in Ohio did that and fleeced some poor bastard out of about $1,500.

 

I think I already posted about this a hundred pages back, but some pissed off guy called to complain that our coverage of the proud men and women who put their lives on the line for our country -- in World Cup winter sports -- wasn't giving them the proper front and center respect.

 

I had some pissed off reader (who, as usual began the email by boasting about how many years he has been a subscriber) complain about not running pregame NFL capsules in the Sunday paper. Silly me figured that the in-town swim meet, in-town wrestling tournament and in-town basketball tournament had priority in a section that was already tight on space. This jerk continued to ramble on about he goes to the ESPN and NFL websites on a weekly basis for the same information anyway.

 

Do you usually run those capsules?

 

To be fair, Army-Navy is still a big deal to a lot of people. But here's the thing I've never understood about readers. Would they rather have Army-Navy on the cover, and stuck at the bottom of the page, with maybe -- maybe -- a 2-column photo, and jump most of the story inside anyway, or wouldn't it be better to run it on, oh, I don't know, 7C, where you can have a decent-length story with a nice 3 or 4 column picture to anchor a CFB page.

 

I don't think we have any readers who would comprehend what you just said. Sometimes we have just a photo of a high school event on our cover that teases inside and supposedly it makes people think we have more prep coverage than we actually do.

We get complaints about stories not being on the cover every now and then. If the story started on the cover got but cut in half with no photos, they probably wouldn't have complained.

 

Exactly. It's crazy how people don't understand that you can give more play to a story inside. Someone those 3-5 stories on the front are all that matter.

 

Put a photo tease out front for the inside story and you can at least close the gap some.

 

There's many times when I as a writer would rather have my story start inside over having it squeezed onto the front.