Dear dimwit on the phone

And the Lil Jennies. Can't forget about them.

 

Some gadfly left a long, rambling message the other day saying I should do a feature on him. I've had many parents ask/demand that stories be written about their kids. But this dude wanted a story written about himself. That was a new one for me.

 

I once had a middle-aged woman demand a story be written about her and two friends who won a "national" award in a very, very niche sport a month or two earlier at a competition about 300 miles away. After everyone in our sports department tried to put her down nicely, she began sending emails basically demanding we call her and eventually, to stop them, I was assigned a short story on it. The woman was nice enough for the most part, but then demanded we send out a photog out to her home. Luckily, her two local teammates/co-competitors would never returned my calls, so I put the story on the backburner and have not heard back from her. I guess she just wanted to brag to someone or maybe doesn't even read the paper to know I never wrote about it.

 

There have been too many this week to even describe. Finally get a break from the HS parents, and now it's the little league/babe ruth/legion parents.

Some weeks it seems like you're finally doing things right, and other weeks it just piles on to no end.

I love sports reporting, but I'm not sure how much more I can take of the extracurricular horseshit. Props to all of the longtime mid-to-small paper editors out there. I don't know how you can do it for so long.

 

Most last because they know what they will cover and what they won't, they set a precedent and stick to it. When you can point to a rule that is set in stone...you are better off in the long-run. Making exceptions just screws you in the end.

 

perfectly said.

 

Not only do I agree with you, but I enjoy your posts simply for the avatar entertainment.

I recently Youtubed those doggies to watch the full video. My pups are still much weirder, though.

 

This. That's what I do.

 

I've never seen the full vid...now I'll have to go find it.

 

Ok, summer swim team "media person"...

1) Make sure you've got the count right this year. Everybody gave you crap when your team wore T-shirts to the league meet a few years ago proclaiming you had won eight straight league titles when it was actually seven.

2) I don't care if it's your 47th consecutive league title. You dominate because the other teams realize this is a summer recreational activity. If they took it seriously, the one town in the league that actually does have a high-school team would at least give you a run for the money. But their best swimmers compete in Tulsa and Springfield in the summer because they want real competition. Get it through your heads.

3) "We get a lot of points from our 15-18 year-old swimmers." Yeah, because every other town's swimmers seem to quit once they turn 14.

4) A front page article? Do you really want the managing editor to laugh in your face?

5) The banquet's Monday, huh? So's the final day of the 9-year-old state baseball tournament that's here in Podunk. And if Podunk is in the finals, that (possibly) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity trumps your banquet celebrating 10 (or nine) consecutive league titles in a crappy swim league.

Sincerely (Up) Yours,
Apeman.

 

News side: Got into work on a 100-degree day Friday. Three hours late, because I was battling a heat-induced migraine, but I knew the office AC would help.

Single-spaced, un-paragraphed letter from the president of the HooValley Hospital Auxiliary, absolutely ripping us eight ways to sideways about how we had embarrassed her organization and why were we targeting them, and "I never asked to be embarrassed, just for a little publicity."

Took me a few minutes, but here's what we did.

In our free, mailed weekly of ads and events listing, we choose maybe six as "Best Bets," usually the most interesting and/or the ones we get a lot of info on. Not a big deal.

Well, we had stuck the best-bet logo on one garden tour item, then followed that with hers, withpout a best-bet tag. There was not a lot of thought put into it. (And if there had been the other one *was* better).

They both got listed. That was it.

You would have thought we came in an peed on her couch. Nasty, nasty stuff.

That may make no sense, but I feel better now.

 

Well, hell, now I'd go pee on her couch.