Christmas-themed Columns

Those are not good columns, but I do feel bad that this kid is getting hammered here and has no one looking out for him where he works. I shudder to think how many times fact checkers, copy editors, and editors have saved my ass from serious pub-day sweats. Having words go straight from your brain to print is a pretty good path to humiliation.

 

A little inside baseball: Twelve to 15 years ago, that paper had a really strong sports section. Competed for APSE awards regularly in the small class. Then Freedom's ownership issues surfaced, the publisher (a really good one, at that) retired, and things unraveled. The SE and another veteran sports writer, both in their late 40s/early 50s, died in the span of 2-3 years, a couple of others went on to bigger papers, and another left the business. The paper's sports section pretty much became a revolving door after that, dropping from six full-timers to two ... the paper is now on its third owner in a decade.

 

If they're done well, I don't have a problem with them.

Yeah, this one was atrocious, I'll leave it at that. Won't beat the kid up anymore than he has been.

But I've read several holiday-themed columns that were well-done. I've written a couple myself, though I don't generally like to go that route. I will say that the ones I wrote got quite a bit of reader feedback. That's kind of the point, is to write stuff that people who read the paper (what's left of them) want to read.

Yeah, I get that so many of these holiday-themed columns are hackish, but honestly, this whole thread reads like a bunch of snobbish movie critics that seem to think their job is to write for other movie critics, not movie patrons who are actually the target audience.

Sports reporters writing to impress other sports reporters and editors is the tone of this thread, and that's a problem in the industry I see all the time. If your readers enjoy something and actually want to read it, then great (so long as it's not factually incorrect, awfully-reported clickbait, of course). If your intent is to impress your peers, then you'd damn well better hope that your peers are each buying 4 dozen subscriptions each.

It seems to come as a surprise to too many sports reporters that the average reader in fact doesn't expect to read Hemingway or Dickens each morning. Don't overthink this.

 

I'm not as hung up on holiday ledes/columns as many others, but if you're going to do it, do it well. That was poorly executed and cringey as all get out.

 

If a writer can be original with a holiday column and has the skill to pull it off, I say go for it, by all means. Trouble is, most of them don't pass that smell test.

 

That's it for me too. I'm sure I did something similar when I was younger and didn't have a strong editor to tell me no. But that was too long and, as others pointed out, didn't follow the pattern of the original.

 

My thoughts:

* I've written stuff that I cringed at when I revisited it a couple years later. I'm sure we all have.

* If you to play off a poem or song, you have to match the meter and rhyme.

* In general, the more generic you are the more you lose readers. A column about area teams trying to win district and regional titles could plop down anywhere. Maybe a Christmas column on what each team needs might work better -- especially if you are willing to push it a little.

 

I cut holiday-themed leads twice as often as a business editor than I did in a community paper's sports section. Funny thing is, I see it from the long-timers as much as the new kids fresh out of college.

I'd have spiked this, but no one got hurt. He's probably done a lot of great stuff we're not discussing here. If not, he's got plenty of time to do so. Godspeed, Mr. Stringer.

 

You have to. It ain't even that hard.
And if you don't, you're a fuckin' hack.

 

I have never written a holiday themed column. And I'm not about to start now. I have written things that when revisited two or three years later made me cringe. It's all part of the learning process for some of us.

 

And then of course if you have a Christmas column you have to write a Hanukkah themed column too in order to avoid a backlash. We've fielded complaints about this over the years. People threatening to cancel their subscription, etc