Dear dimwit on the phone

I love that logic too because, in my head, it means they really think some pedophile is scoping out the local newspapers for kids to dittle.

Yes, panicked mom, if you don't give me Little Jimmy's full name, it will totally prevent the kid toucher from getting him. It's not as if the Little League district has a full website with dates, times and locations for every single one of your kids' games and it's not as if the kid dittlers would take the time to just scope out random Little League parks.

No, a 4x4 black-and-white photo on the third page of sports section is what's going to make the difference between Little Jimmy staying angelic and being defiled.

Solid logic there, champ.

 

It always comes back to Little Jimmy.

Poor kid.

 

Just goes along with all of the antibacterial stuff too. Little Johnny probably has asthma and allergies at 3 because you sanatized EVERYTHING, and he never built up tolerance.

 

There are some cases where custody issues and such require that a child's identity is protected, so it's not always a case of overprotective parents. That said, I've come across that situation 3-4 times in my 15 years in community newspapers. And yes, parents expecting stories to be filled with "Johnny had a great day at the plate" should read the paper once in awhile and see that they're off-base.

In the few real cases I've dealt with, the coaches and all involved were very cool about it...unfortunately the kids couldn't be mentioned in stories, and we had to double check photos to be sure they weren't in the background, etc.

 

Stuff like that I understand. It's when parents get overprotective that I really don't get -- and that's probably because I don't have any kids of my own. Maybe that'll change when I do.

 

I have two young kids...no problems at all with the ID thing personally...but there are enough wacky families out there to make me respect it in the few real cases that we come across.

 

I actually can understand why a parent may not feel comfortable with their young kids' names or photos in the paper, and I imagine most papers would just as soon meet a request for that if they just understood it's all or nothing. You can either have the full name in the cutline or no photo of the kid runs at all.

 

I'm with you on that.
Just got off the phone with a mom who left a very angry message. We ran a photo of two baseball kids running into each other as the ball falls to the ground. Good photo, but our guy misidentified the kid.
I call her, tell her we'll run a correction, no problem, but it's about all we can do. Then she gives me some story about her kid is getting cyber-bullied because of the photo and doesn't play that much because while he's from the town, he goes to a private school and blah blah blah.
But asked if she wants us to do a story on the cyber bullying, she declines.

 

Speaking as a kid who was in Little League, screwed up a lot and never had his photo taken, that's going to happen anyway. Kids are cruel, and they don't need much provoking to do it. Every few years, there is an outcry about how bullies are using a new medium - FB, Twitter, texting - to harass other kids.

 

How about not letting your 12-year-old have a fake Facebook account...there's a simple solution.

 

how bout not covering Little League in the first place .... another solution

 

Really? It's the lifeblood of many small papers. I'm sure it would go over well if we just stopped covering it. Dan, I'm not trying to be an ass, but that seems like a typical answer from the older generation. If a little league kid is getting bullied because of something that ran in the paper, it's not the paper's fault.