Dear dimwit on the phone

That crazy doodah ...

 

Sure your press guys don't moonlight for us? Fall before last, we were given until 12:15 a.m. on Friday nights (pm M-F, am weekender Sat). When football season ended in early December, I offered to go back to an earlier deadline, but the exec. editor said, no, keep it where it is. Would still get things out by 11:20 or so. EIGHT MONTHS later, production guy sends an email wondering why Friday deadline was never changed. Exec. editor fired back noting we'd been sending in pages an hour early oh, all year ...

 

Holy shit, where are you, Anchorage? I had just freelance, clearly part-time jobs at 50 per assignment and got about 30 applicants.

 

Look at the bright side. At least you'll have plenty of time to do video! </cross>

 

SGreen: Southeast Kansas, which, despite the presense of several jucos and Pitt State, is not a place where young people want to establish a career. I don't remember if I said this earlier, but we had six total candidates for managing editor in 19 months.

Schiez: We dabbled in video very briefly. I killed it during my interim ME time, one of the few changes I made during that time, because I successfully argued that I didn't have enough time to layout and edit the news pages, do all the sports on my own as usual AND worry about editing video.

 

Tebow, do these things come grouped together in threes like celebrity deaths do?

Today's feature: A lady calls and wants a picture of her daughter's softball team that we ran ... back in July. Want to guess which photo, for whatever reason, is the one that's not on anyone's hard drive or posted to our web site?

Two lessons, lady: 1) Don't wait six months to ask for a copy and 2) If you do wait six months, don't be disappointed to discover we don't have it, because we're not your backup hard drive.

Sheesh.

 

Dear clueless parent,
Just because the radio station is called "Podunk's ESPN radio," doesn't mean ESPN picked their all-region team. And we don't run stories on other media outlets' all-region teams (except for the all-state teams from Maxpreps and the group that does the state rankings) anyway, and it doesn't matter if your spawn is on it or not, which I suspect is the only reason you give a damn. Oh, cancel your subscription? Can't do it here. Got a paper to put out, ya know? Do it yourself, asshole, since its obvious you don't think a hell of a lot of my abilities.

 

always amazed at the "Cancel my subscription" threat that is supposed to send us into hysterics, dropping to our knees and pleading for their readership.

You're right, if you don't like our product, don't buy it. But don't expect to find extensive news of Podunk High anywhere else.

 

My sentiments exactly. They have a radio signal that goes into this county. They don't need what amounts to a free ad in our paper, and all the players mentioned were on our All-County team (and the station's copy looks very similar to ours, but with exclamation points).

I did the "right thing" and let the ME know what was going on, and, of course, she's going into convulsions over losing a subscriber. I think I made a good case for not running the story, but she wants to look at the links.

Now, I know all the rules are changing as we try to stay alive as an industry, and I may be going over the top a bit, but do we have to bend over for every reader who threatens to drop us (but will probably read us on the Internet anyway)? What's to stop someone else from coming up with a "My backyard All-Star Team?" Or the "Little Johnnie made the Bigtown Banner's team, are you gonna do a story?" requests?

 

I have done follow-up on the people who stopped their papers and cited some complaint about sports as the reason. On average, those people are back with us within 90 days.

 

Stuff like this drives me nuts, and we get it in TV all the time. "You guys did a story on some cancer research... I think it was like a week and a half ago... I'm not sure what show it was on.. can you send that to me?" Most of the time, it wasn't even us. People have no idea which station is which. Our viewer emails today included one that said "You reported today on 'Fox and Friends'..." and another one ripping us for not living up to the motto of "We Report, You Decide." And no, I don't work for Fox.

 

But it's still OK for me to tell people my son, Lobster Jr., was profiled in the New York Times because one of their 8K-circulation dailies covered some of his games, right? I mean, I've been doing it for years and it'd be a real hit to our egos.