Dear dimwit on the phone

And it's a real art.

 

I remember the day when I could sling agate with the best of 'em.

 

Common sense does not run the sports department at my paper. Random anonymous callers and e-mailers with complaints do.

 

Nothing's worse than an SE who has a knee-jerk reaction every time ONE person calls to bitch about some piece of agate didn't make the cut that day. Or when we decide to stop running NBA boxes or whatever, we get three calls aaaaand they're back. If I were an SE, my paper would run boxes for the major sports in town and that's about it. Local MiLB standings, Arena or whatever we have locally. Maybe a column a day, not counting the major sports. Who really looks at agate that closely anymore? I go online to find my fantasy stats, and pretty much all you need to know should be mentioned in the roundup.

 

You'd be amazed. We get calls without fail from people (as in more than one) bitching if we don't run the Sprint Cup results in Monday's paper and insist that they run in the next available edition.

We also used to have an old lady who routinely complained if we didn't run the results from whatever pro tennis tournament was going on anywhere on the planet.

 

Yeah, I could see something like Sprint Cup, since all of the results matter. Would continue to run those and major tennis tournaments, but not Nationwide or any of the minor tennis tournaments, at least in the early rounds.

 

I suppose there's a balance. You put some thought into your decisions and stick with them for a reasonable period, knowing you can't please everyone. But you also take opinions into account.

 

If that one person is right, then he or she speaks for many others.
You have to take that into account.

 

Dear serial caller, you're not a baseball fan if you have to call 162 times a year to get the team's score.

 

Of course, the question is how do you determine who is "right"?

 

This. If the department makes a decision, then they see that as the "right" decision and should not waffle just because of a few phone calls. Now, if it's a matter of people canceling subscriptions or something, then that needs to be reconsidered. Or if the volume of calls is more than expected. As in when you make even the most minor changes to the TV guide.

 

In even the smallest of markets, there will be a variety of opinions on what should and should not run. One person wants auto racing results, someone else the complete list of golf scores, someone else NBA and NHL boxscores, someone else the NCAA individual stat leaders. It just comes down to what one's interest are.

I've been doing agate a very long time and consider myself pretty good at jamming a lot of information into a small amount of space. I always tried to find a balance and yet remain consistent. I'd take one day a week to run the NBA leaders, another day for NHL or MLB or NFL. When I worked in winter sports areas, I'd run world cup skiing and college hockey scores. I personally despise auto racing, but I'd run the results (even Nationwide Series races and F-1) and lineups whenever possible, because I realized a certain percentage of the readership followed it.

One thing I often did was cut things like umpires names (as well as attendance and time of game, etc.) from the MLB boxes when necessary in order to make them fit. We had one active MLB umpire who was from our town. So, sure enough, someone complained. I explained why I cut that and told them to look it up online if they were that interested.