Christmas-themed Columns

The same dude wrote this: Area athletic scene: The gift that keeps on giving the whole year.

Wow.

 

Second-worst column of the month. ... Also, ever.

 

Man, I hate to beat this kid up, but somebody needs to give him some direction. Good Lord.

 

Discovered the answer to my own question. The sports editor up there is ... the author himself. (Insert terror music here.)

 

And if you're a 22-year-old entry-level sports desker, do you rewrite the 24-year-old sports editor's poor column -- or tell him the entire premise is ridiculous? You have situations like that, too.

 

I've written a couple of Festivus columns in which I've aired grievances with the sports world. One was because the publisher mandated that all columns be Christmas-themed, and that was my subtle way of protesting. The other was a couple of weeks ago when I just could not think of anything better and had to put something on the paper. Both times were basically bullet-pointed columns with three or four items. Not a full-blown bad attempt to be clever for what felt like 1,500 words.
The first 30 seconds of this are what it felt like trying to read that column:

 

There's an annual "bulleted item" column for one of the tournaments. It might have run already this year. It consists of factoids pulled from the program. They are organized in no fashion; it's simply a text dump. Better still, either the program has inaccuracies, or whoever does the pulling makes some mistakes. Either way, it's chock-full of misinformation.

 

The first two papers I worked for banned Thanksgiving- and Christmas-themed columns. I learned that first-hand at my first paper because I wanted to write one (was young and stupid at the time) and was told the managing editor considered them "cliched and sophomoric." Too bad that managing editor wasn't in charge at the Northwest Florida Daily News.

 

Wasn't there a tradition here once upon a time that we didn't call out writers at small-market papers to make fun of their efforts?

 

There was/is, although this seems more about systemic failure than personal failure. (Or at least that's how I'm perceiving it.)

As a boss once told me, even a good editor needs a good editor.

 

This kid's writing is actually fine. He just needs to be coached and edited. The criticism is aimed at the newspaper/management, not the writer. Although, one could understand it appearing to be aimed at the writer alone. But that's not the intention.

The intention is to demonstrate what happens when newspapers cut staff to the point that it no longer has control of quality within its content. As someone else stated, they were mandated to write a Christmas column so they had to do something. Forcing someone to write something with mandatory quotas is a recipe for garbage making it into the paper, which reflects poorly on everybody.

 

A complete 180 from your first two posts, which were completely mocking the writer and made no mention of management.