Dear dimwit on the phone

Whatever that is is probably Fox Soccer Plus. It's on another tier up from the programming package I have on DirecTV.

When Fox rearranged all those networks, Aussie rules football started appearing on Fox Sports 2 ... except the Grand Final, which was put on Fox Soccer Plus. Then it was the week after the GF, IIRC, that DirecTV had a free trial for Fox Soccer Plus.

I believe there's also another version of Speed that exists (It might be online only?) but it doesn't have much compared to the former version.

 

Today's e-mail — why aren't we giving more coverage to Big Local High School's 0-14 girls basketball team than to No. 2-ranked Small Local Catholic High School.

Oh, and Mr. E-mailer, the reason why a TV station was at one of Big Local High School's girls basketball game recently was probably to get highlights of their local team hanging a 40-point spread on you.

 

Back to TV listings for a sec:

Anyone else have to have all the ESPN channels listed together? Like this:

Arizona at Kentucky, 9 p.m., ESPN
Kansas at Florida, 9 p.m., ESPN2

And so on ...

I don't know why, but I have to keep the ESPN channels together when I'm doing the TV sked.

 

I prefer that, yes.

 

Makes sense. I would do them chronologically by sport. Example: "Men's college basketball...... Duke at Virginia, 7 pm, ESPN.... Kansas at Oklahoma, 7 pm, FSN.... Arizona at UCLA, 9 pm, ESPN.... Saint Mary's at Gonzaga, 9 pm, ESPN2"

That way, as you go down the list, you go from earliest to latest. I did like to group events under sport specific headings rather than lump them all together. Made it easier for fans of a particular sport to find out what was showing. (Gee, hope I explained that OK.)

 

I've found it's a lot more fun to put the college basketball games under an NBA heading, and NFL under tennis. On top of that, I'll put them in random chronological order. Keeps the readers on their toes.

Really, Mark?

 

Dear spamming flak: Just because I write in a story a team's best hope is the development of a basketball with GPS, does NOT mean I want to do a story about your client's GPS devices. Do you actually read the stories the aggregator finds for you, or do you just spam away?

 

I ran into a similar situation during the World Series. Was tweeting with a friend about the stickers that Saltalamacchia had on his nails to help the pitchers see and the company spam tweeted both of us talking about the product and its uses. Really creepy and sad.

 

Is there any point to politely replying to the PR people? I frequently get pitches which could be interesting if they were local, but they're obviously meant for a nearby paper with a similar name.

I haven't gotten more accurately localized response back. Maybe I wasn't polite enough. :

 

I can't remember the last time I got a useful PR e-mail.

I never respond to them. Sometimes, I'll get a particularly persistent PR person, who will send a followup, essentially asking, "Did you get my first e-mail. Are you interested?"

I respond then with, "No."

 

I love the PR e-mails that come in with the first sentence being, "Hello Pete, as per our phone conversation of this afternoon, here is the written release you requested on <some crap nobody wants> for the story you expressed an interest in doing."

Sorry, PR hack, but Pete hasn't worked here in 7 years, and his replacement hasn't worked here in 3 years. Maybe - and this is a wild suggestion - you'd be better served in seeing who your contact should be before sending an unsolicited e-mail lying about a phone conversation to drum up interest in your overpriced, crappy widgets?

 

Start just about every day hitting the delete button for everything from folks wanting to revise our website to folks wondering if I want to talk to "nationally-known experts" on whatever is leading the news cycle. We're a smalltown daily, no thanks.

But, last week, I got three similar emails from the regional Social Security office within a 45-minute period. Finally hit reply and asked why the sender thought this could be of any possible interest to the sports department?