Dear dimwit on the phone

Better: "Let me connect you with our advertising department."

 

Oh man, we have one of those guys. He's the owner of a physical therapy place and has a "Wall of Fame" that would "make for a very cool story." On the wall are photos of the "stars" who have come in and received treatment. The biggest of those "stars" is a minor-league baseball player. Yeah ..... no.

We actually did a story on a professional sailor who injured his back and is working to get back with the team. Lo and behold, when we show up, this guy has an extremely wrinkled shirt on with the name of the business on it. I'm assuming the owner dug it up and said, "Hey throw this on, they're sending a photographer."

Douche.

 

Response I wish I could have made to an angry e-mail from a mom who was upset about a passage in my column about her son's high school baseball team, and said that I was no fan of said team and that I should be banned from covering any future games involving that team:

Dear Ms. Angry Mom,

Thanks for the compliment. It's not my job to be a fan of your team or any other team in our coverage area. The fact that someone like you is upset because I dared to defend a former coach who was treated abysmally by the school and its fans tells me I'm doing my job correctly.

And I would love to be banned from your school's games. That way I wouldn't have to put up with the arrogance and sense of entitlement that exists at your school from the highest echelon of the administration to the lowliest freshman student in the school. Alas, yours is the largest school in our area, so I don't have that option and you don't have the power to make it happen.

Therefore, I'll be sure to wave at you the next time I'm at your school for a game.

Have a nice day.

Sincerely, albert77

 

Reading about the business trolling for free advertising brought a cold shiver thinking of "Progress" editions. Anyone who cut their teeth in Podunk can tell you about that nightmare.

 

Ah, Progress. I have many, many memories (none of them good) about that monstrosity. One of the thing I DON'T miss about the newspaper business.

 

Progress was time consuming, but in the summer with nothing else going on, those made days go by faster. Really easy with the questionnaire we sent out.

 

Ours comes out in early February. They wanted me to do something sports-related for it one year. Coincidentally, that year the juco had entered into a new radio contract and had decided to switch from Coke to Pepsi products because the Coke distributor was always slow to respond to the juco's needs (more than once, the kids working the concession stand would have to go make a Walmart run because the Coke people didn't bring stuff that day). So I put together something about how both those deals were working out. And since I wrote it myself (a lot of Progress articles were contributed by the businesses they were about), it didn't read as heavy-handed advertising-disguised-as-journalism.

 

One of our papers did a "Progress" sort of piece one year that focused on really strange jobs in the community. I can't remember them all, but there was some really weird stuff in there. Even weirder than being a newspaper copy editor.

 

When you're at a small mom-and-pop weekly, you accept that those editions really help the bottom line.

You don't have to like it, but you have to accept it.

 

One night on the copy desk I get a call from a rather upset gentleman wanting to know where I was located. I was slightly apprehensive about giving my exact location and muttered something about "in the far rear of the newsroom, below the big window".

Turns out the guy was super pissed because our large newspaper chain had outsourced customer service to some place in Bangledesh and the guy was trying to place a hold on delivery while he was going on vacation and the people in Bangledesh weren't treating him too well. So he suspected that the entire paper was being produced in Bangledesh, too.

I assured him I was in fact actually in Podunk. I was hoping he wasn't carrying a gun.

 

The only good thing about the "Progress" editions at the weekly where I started my career at was that we'd get paid extra per piece. Which wasn't really that great, considering the publisher expected us to put in unpaid overtime for everything else.

 

Best story I ever wrote for a progress (or as we called it, "pride") edition, I spent the whole summer in our morgue researching the city's semipro baseball team from the 30s to the mid-50s. Semipro was huge then, before TV was developed and the major leagues expanded to the West Coast. Talked to a couple of old-timers as well. A few years later, when one of them died, the played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as the recessional, and we all sang along.