Dear dimwit on the phone

I agree with schiezainc.

If we're going to cover them, put nice pictures of the paper, point out the good plays, etc., sometimes there's a negative to that.

I am certainly not advocating listing every error or running an error photo every game, but this scenario works.

I go back to this line almost every year when the star football play gets arrested/loses eligibility/etc. right before the state playoffs.

"Why are you writing about his arrest? It will hurt him and the team?"

Why, because all season he and the team have been on the front of the section, and not because we are boosters.

 

I'm kinda split on the whole thing.

Does the kid's picture get in the paper on other occasions? If so, I would feel a little better about running it. You show the good, then you show the bad. And if the play had to do with the final result, I can see running that as well.

But if it was a kid who never gets off the bench, and since it was a six-run game, it's not quite as germane. You can make the point in the story, how the weather sucked, how the teams (I assume), just started playing after being in a gym for practice, quotes from the coaches on "We have a lot more work ahead of us, blah, blah, blah", etc.

 

The picture told the story at a glance. The story fleshed out what happened.
If that's the kid's only error in his high school career, I'll be surprised.
My guess is that the kid's grandparents and parents are more in an uproar over the photo than he is.
It's not as if the reporter and photographer (if you're lucky to have one of each instead of someone pulling double duty) went to the game specifically to get a shot of an error in order to make it the focal point of the story.

 

I probably would have run the photo much smaller, maybe making the home-run trot the main art. If it's a really embarrassing photo, I wouldn't have run it at all. I've found that preps readers (parents, grandparents, old timers who graduated from that school in 1959 and hang around in their letterman jacket) just don't care. You can write critical things or point out errors in print, but they hate photos like that.

 

Fossy, you made the right call.
As long as he's raised right, it will make him a better person. He'll use the picture as motivation to get better. Then later on down the line, he does something big that gets captured on film or in print and gets that on the front page.
No one likes to talk about using the agony of defeat as a learning moment. As long as you're not running the photo to make the kid look like an asshole, it was the right decision.

 

Heck, you have some readers who don't even want anything critical or errors mentioned in the paper. Especially if you name the kid.

 

Always had trouble with this line of thinking. I'm not going to take a kid to task for an error like I might if I were covering the major leagues, but to my way of thinking, the kid knows he made an error, and not having it in the next day's paper isn't going to change that. Same with those coaches that only call when they win ... the kids know they lost, so what is he/she protecting them from?

 

Agreeing with Han!

 

I'll go with this.

Honestly, with a dozen errors, this kids' wasn't the game-changer. The team was outmatched and the errors were only part of the story.

As much as we hate it, when you're covering local stories you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. This is true on both sides. This was obviously a throw away game, why make a kid look bad?

It's taken me a long time to realize that there is a time to make friends and a time to make enemies. Championship games are a time to make enemies.

 

No, no, no ... this wasn't a throw-away game (as I said, two teams that finished 1-2 in the division two years ago and play each other in football on Thanksgiving Day). And I wasn't trying to catch flies. I was trying to report the story, which, sorry to offend anyone, was 12 errors.

And if you're the starting shortstop on a team that will eventually finish above .500 and make the playoffs, you're subjected to the rare photo of you making a botched play in a game that nobody played well. It happens. It clearly was the story here, and I'm not out to make you look good to spare feelings or sell more papers. That's not what I (or anyone in this business) should do.

 

Ding, ding, ding.

All I know is if I pick up your paper and there's a game story describing a contest that had a dozen errors and the photo used to accompany said story is of a kid smiling or hitting a home run or something, I'm going to wonder why the photo chosen wasn't something more representative of what actually happened.

It'd be like running a story on the Vancouver riots last year and accompanying it with a lovely photo of a Vancouver park because you don't want anyone to be sad by the graphic photo of broken glass and fire.

 

If it's an error/mistake made in the heat of the game, I'll often go with Podunk's final drive ended with a fumble at the 5-yard line or some such wording.

If it's a behavior/sportsmanship issue I don't have a problem describing the kid in more detail. Poduck guard Spencer Sally argued the call and followed Central High's John Doe to half-court, drawing a technical foul. Central turned it into four points over the next 12 seconds and won the game 73-70.