A reader e-mail that irks me...

I'm just saying that you understand where they are coming from. And explain how things work. I'm not saying to promise to print little Billy's name in the paper. But sometimes in the conversation, you find that there is a good story about the team or the coach or whatever.

Sometimes you just agree to disagree, but 90 percent of the time the parent seems to feel better that at least their gripe was heard.

 

TP, unfortunately what you say is sometimes true. I have to cover tennis matches witnessed by hundreds of invisible people because a few whiners have my executive editor's ear. I tell him it makes no sense to cover stuff only a few people care about but I have to do what I'm told.

 

ace: agreed.

tar: "unfortunately"? you now officially "sound" a lot like mrs. petty.

 

Brilliant

 

I agree. I'd take the time to say -- at the very least -- "thank you for your feedback." And leave it at that if I have to.

Actually, I can still remember a response to an e-mail I sent to a columnist at my former university's daily student paper. She THANKED me for writing in, even though I was critical. Actually, she thanked me for BEING critical. She also acknowledged what I wrote, which was that she didn't do a good job of making her points.

It was arguably the most mature response I've gotten to a letter to the editor I've written where I was critical.

 

1) You did mess up. Going to high school kids to ask how the best kid on the team finished is laziness. (Would you go to a receiver and ask how many yards the running back had?) You at least could've interviewed them while you were at it. Sounds like you were trying to half-ass the assignment from the get-go. That is, not finding the best story, but the easy story. We've all done it. Lesson learned.

2) Don't get mad at the reader just because he called you on it.

3) Always respond to reader emails, especially if they were CC'd to your superiors. Be polite. Be brief. Be done.

 

i agree with No. 3 and No. 3 alone.

 

That letter was not about asking kids where another kid is. That letter was about one parent who was upset that his kid was not the focus of the article. That is ALL these parents care about. Do you think if that parent didn't have a kid on the team he'd bother to "call out" the reporter?

It's the entitlement mentality. And it disgusts me.

Sure, my parents clipped the newspaper whenever my name was in it. But they would never, NEVER have thought to contact the paper and complain about coverage or names in the paper. They simply didn't expect my soccer games to get writeups, or those writeups to include anything other than scoring details. Anything beyond that was a bonus.

 

That's crap. As I said before, there were 40+ teams, 500+ runners, and it was impossible to find the ONE coach I needed. I should have asked the kids how they did, yes, but wouldn't the parent have been pissed even if I had interviewed the kids and then not used their quotes because they didn't finish in the top 100-200?

 

i went to a nike meet once many years ago. i know exactly what you're talking about, and you are 100 percent correct.

 

And furthermore, my experience with cross-country coaches is that they're not the easiest people to talk to at meets. As much as they say they want you to cover meets in person, when you do show up at a meet, no matter when you try to talk to them, they always act like there's something they needed to do five minutes ago.