TJ Simers on changes in Los Angeles Times sports section going into effect Monday

It's sad that there is apparently no one who cares for TJ Simers enough to stop him from doing this.

What a pathetic pantload of a man.

 

A decision to reboot the paper was made way above the sports editor. But thanks for playing and do enjoy our lovely parting gifts.

 

And his first sentence is inaccurate. I unfortunately know a much-bigger award chaser than Bill Plaschke.

 

Is it TJ Simers?

 

As Deep Throat explained, now every writer spends most of their time trying to figure out what earns conversions. News is no longer a priority.

The sports editor gives every writer a list of conversions each day to embarrass those who have failed to secure any conversions. The sports editor does not like stories that are critical, thereby explaining why the next seven days will be filled with puff pieces, like homeless soccer.

 

I'd love to know how many hits these blog posts get. Take away the ones generated from here, and his family, and it has to be less than five.

 

So, I would like see/hear what they've found actually does earn conversions, if anything does, or if it's been, seriously, all downhill, no matter what is offered. Even nice, easy puff pieces lose their power after a while.

 

Knowing how much AL.com is driven by clicks and engagement, I’m going to guess stories about eating out. That’s half the damn site this summer. One day will be top 5 burgers in Birmingham. Then the next days they repeat it for Huntsville, Mobile and statewide. Then comes the list of reader submissions for places not mentioned. Then they repeat the cycle with barbecue, hot dogs, doughnuts, etc. And half the places the mention in the “stories” (I played along and read for a couple of weeks until the pattern grew obvious) are links to Top Whatever lists they did 2-3 years ago.

All of that to say, someone decided long ago writing for people who like to read is a money-losing proposition.

 

I’d reply to Dixie’s post, but about three sentences in I had to drop everything and start Googling Birmingham burger joints …

 

Any decent points TJ makes (and there are a few) and amusing arrows fired the way of management (and there are a lot) are dwarfed by the inexplicable meanness to Sarah Valenzuela. The Plaschke digs aren't nice either, but I'm sure Bill has heard worse. But there's no reason to drag a young writer on her first major beat. It'd probably be interesting (at least to us) if TJ wanted to write generally about young writers being thrown into the deep end of beats (though that's been going on since the dawn of time). It'd even be fine if he wanted to gently scold, in a general sense, about the emphasis on Twitter and how maybe there's a way to provide more context about the game there, especially in an era when the newspaper can't or won't do it. But what's the point of dragging the beat writer? It's cruel and mean-spirited. But that's the TJ way.

 

Couldn’t get TJ’s blog post to load on my phone, but here’s an interesting question we deal with at my shop, where the deadline for pages on our three print days is 5 p.m.:

If you’re really committed to going the feature/no gamer route, should you be bending over backward to get in afternoon games from your city/region? I know we do for Thursday afternoon Mariners games and the rare Saturday afternoon UW/Washington State college FB games.

 

In the 1980s I worked for a paper that published Tuesday through Saturday morning (we worked Monday through Friday). But our publisher wanted us to use an AP running lead on every gamer.
So if a Friday night gamer didn't make the paper, we still had to write the basic running lead on a story that readers wouldn't see until Tuesday's paper.

On another note, T.J. actually turned out some tremendous stories when he was a beat or feature writer before he started naming names and bashing everyone in his columns.
Still remember he wrote perhaps the best story I've ever read on Willie Shoemaker or any jockey for that matter.