Best SportsJournalists.com threads of the past

They want to drop the hammer on me for a reference to Wenalway, they can have at it.

Wenalway. Wenalway. Wenalway.

And Hermes, yes. Hand-wringing over font size and bastard column widths and InDesign quirks did take up years of my life I'll never get back. It was also the job I thought I'd always have, so ...

 

Let enough time pass and somebody will try to rehabilitate the image of any unhinged misanthrope I suppose.

 

Actually producing a newspaper was not a waste. Arguing over the minute details as a means of saving the business was. I did it, too. It’s just a useful exercise to examine what things we get hung up on in life in hindsight, always looking for the bigger picture so that we don’t get stuck in that cul-de-sac.

After 2009 I stopped fighting the tide and enjoyed the job while it still existed.

 

I'm glad somebody did. LOL.

Was. He. Wrong. Don't make me defend a jackass, just face the fact.

 

I remember at least a couple of times asking him to provide examples of what he thought was “right” and he never produced any. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to try that tactic. “Everyone else is wrong” without taking a stand in favor of something concrete to oppose it isn’t brave truth-telling. It’s contrarianism.

I started to say contrarianism for its own sake, but that may be ascribing malice unfairly. I truly think the guy had/has some issues that keep him from relating to people in healthy, accepted ways.

 

Won't disagree with a thing you said there. I think he was so sure he was the smartest kid in the room, he didn't feel the need to explain things to us peons.

 

This is bullshit and I demand you retract it immediately. It's not like this country has ever elected as its president a racist/sexist/rapist/morally and financially bankrupt foreign agent despite decades of evidence he was a racist/sexist/rapist/morally and financially bankrupt foreign agent.

 

He had . . . issues.

But his advice to the buggy whip designers was good buggy whip design advice.

 

Not a thread, but my favorite SJ moment was Daniel Simpson Day (in a thread about a car accident involving Giuliani) wrote "no collision!"

Brilliant. Just two words...and it got 60 likes. Amazing.

 

I'm with you, Shottie, though I wouldn't go so far to say he was ahead of his time. Just a crank to end all cranks. (Which is where I'll leave it because that dude did go after people off-board, myself included.)

The arguments over design were navel-gazing at its worst. Readers did not care whether they saw a photo cut or a photo. A score bug, a decent, but not over-the-top breakout. All they needed.

I do wonder if the tyranny of design wrecked papers? Or did design lengthen the lives of papers? Go back to 1970 and beyond and the paper looked nothing like it did a decade later. The papers were packed with everything under the sun. Very little art, but quite a bit of content. It'll never happen, but it would be interesting to design a paper in a 1970 manner and see how it was received? Probably not well, because anyone under 60 is used to four or five stories a page, but it would be interesting. You'd probably have to sell it as a nostalgia piece to make it work.

I do a lot of historical research. For as dense as those papers were, they're invaluable as a resource. We've spent so much time deciding what readers could get elsewhere that we've given readers no reason to seek much of anything from us.

Anyway, how did the above story/interview ever get written? I am blown away that it exists. Who was the audience for this? Why Syracuse? Why a Q&A format for someone who was the ultimate in inside baseball crazing against the machine about something readers don't give a shit about?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad it does exist because it's so bizarre. I can appreciate it on that level.

 

When I've had to bust out microfilm to look up information from the 1960s and 70s at my shop, my 20-something coworkers act like I'm unrolling the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What really gets them in those old editions of the Podunk Press are the huge "ROP" grocery store ads (with great clip art food) and the 10-page classified section. There literally has not been a point in their conscious lifetimes that those things were not available online.

In a related item, the plot line of Yacht Rock classic "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" is totally lost on those 20-somethings.

 

“So I clicked over to Craigslist
Typed up a personal ad
And though I’m nobody’s poet
Turned out it wasn’t half bad”