Dear dimwit on the phone

All at the beach, eh?

Have crowbar, will travel.

Reads the card of this man.

 

We have a lot of vocal MLS fans outraged by the move to Apple TV, but they place all the blame the local team, not the league.

 

We have a fireworks game every July 3. For about half the crowd (3,300), it's the only game they go to all year, no problem with that. I do have a problem when those same numbnuts call the office and ask, "What time will the game be over?"

It's baseball. Could be less than two hours, which we've had, and we had to kill some time before it got totally dark, with skits, sing-alongs, dance-offs between players, etc. We also had a fireworks night game go 17 innings; it took 5:14 and we didn't shoot them off until after 12:30 a.m. Probably 1500 of the original 3,200 stayed.

We had a runner called out at first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th and a runner on third. He was clearly safe, ump blew the call, winning run didn't score and we got eight innings of bonus baseball, with a 7th and a 14th-inning stretch.

 

The 1985 Atlanta Braves would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

Yeah, lots of similarities, and the Braves game was referenced many times that night.

 

You get many readers demanding increased coverage of whatever sport (ultimate, lacrosse, cricket, rugby, etc.) claiming it's the "fastest growing sport in America"? Although in the case of pickleball, it's actually true. Got an email saying the fastest growing sport is..... golf.

 

Our website lists the top-read stories and it's always the same sports teams with the occasional outlier. Every now and then we get someone complaining that their favorite team isn't on the list and somehow it's our fault.

 

"Underwater basket weaving would be popular if you covered it!!!"

 

see also, “rising in popularity” and “exploding in popularity” (though usually not the case)

 

Dear dimwit from the stands,
Yes, I've been sending out the results of tonight's MMA card on social media. Part of the job (plus lets the sports editor know I'm on top of the assignment while he's covering Town High in the state hoops finals). No, you can't take a picture of my social media home page. That's why I covered it with my hands as soon as you asked.

 

Fun times tonight.
A known celebrity who is, by all accounts, a good guy who has done a lot of good work in our small community, went and got himself a DUI in another state. It's making some national news because of his stature, even though it was a misdemeanor first-offense DUI that he'll probably plead down to a suspended license, probation, and/or some community service, if that. I aggregated a story from a half-dozen other outlets where it happened (with attribution and links) to piece together our own story and posted it to our website.
It's going over in our town like a wet fart in church, and not because the guy got arrested after being drunk in his car at 3 a.m.
People are mad at us for posting it at all, even though it's literally on a dozen other outlets' web sites — all of them much larger than ours. If you Google his name, our story doesn't even pop up until the second page.
Like if we don't post it, it magically vanishes? We didn't even break this news, we simply re-reported it.

Some of my favorite (and by favorite, I mean least favorite) comments are along the lines of, "They couldn't wait for him to slip up."
Yes, because I was gritting my teeth having to write 10 years' worth of deservedly positive, fawning stories, including a column two weeks ago, and cursing every minute of it. And when I saw the news alert someone sent me while I was in between covering two games this afternoon, my first thought was, "Hot DAMN! I finally get to knock that goody-goody down a peg!" and not, "Shit, now I have to write another story on top of the three others on the docket for tonight. Thanks, dude."
Oh, and the condescending "Do better, Batman" comment that makes me want to put my fist through a kitten's face every time I read it.
The comments are running about 100 to 0 right now against US for reporting it, not him for getting arrested in the first place. I expected some of that reaction, but not for it to be so overwhelmingly one-sided.

In any event, I guess this is an age-old Journalism Ethics 101 dilemma right down to the DUI charge.
Is it worth it to write or even repost the negative story about the beloved hometown hero, knowing people are going to try and shoot the messenger with a gatling gun?
Is it possible to just ignore it and maintain any shred of credibility or self-dignity?

And for those of you who have dealt with this type of thing before, how do you handle the follow-up and aftermath?
I'm a little worried that a hurricane is blowing through right now and come morning we're going to have utter devastation on our doorstep in the form of canceled subscriptions and very ill will in the community. And then all of that will somehow be dumped back on me. I rarely worry about that stuff, and I do have about as much job security right now as you can have in this business these days. But this reaction is so one-sided that it does have me concerned it'll be one of those things people remember for years and harbor resentment toward the paper about. They tend to do that here.
My immediate reaction is to write a column explaining the rationale for it, and pointing out the several dozen positive stories we've written about him. But then I'm afraid that would do more harm than good because people don't want to hear it, or it would come across as, "See! Now they're scared!"

I'm not sure if the "Dear Dimwit" thread is quite the right place for a journalism "Dear Abby" letter, but it's been a good catch-all sounding board before and a good place to vent about stuff like this. Thanks.

 

Explain nothing. Let it ride. Anybody who cancels was gonna anyway, and if you’re the only game in town, they’ll be back. And in three days everybody will forget about it and be outraged about something else.