DMN update

The fine folks of Collin County will have a surprise this morning when they open up their paper on this first Saturday morning of prep pigskin, and see that their extra deluxe 6-page zone wrap which they had last year has disappeared.

 

Joe and Martha,

Good luck! Come to Florida!

MGB

 

unless times have changed, plano will always get some DMN love because its ... well, plano. money talks around there.

 

I don't think the abverage sports fans in Dallas will be too upset with the loss of Blackistone. He's been criticized as a one-trick pony who troes to inject race into almost every column, and a lot of people have just stopped reading him.

Fraley will be mourned by baseball fans, but he'd been phased out over the past year or so since he took his hiatus to California.

What has driven fans in Dallas to the FWST more and more in recent years is the depth of the local coverage of the big four teams. College, preps and national stories are all secondary to the Cowboys third receiver rolling his ankle. The DMN has steadily lost ground on that front, and with these moves, I wouldn't be surprised if the FWST becomes the first choice for local sports-minded readers.

 

Add another name to escapees from the Belo Death Star. Steve Salazar, who has been there two years on the copy desk, is leaving for a night sports ed gig at the Charlotte Observer.

 

kritter

I think Blackistone gets a bad rap about race because 95 percent of the time he is the columnist willing to write about it and most people are uncomfortable discussing race in a public forum. Blackistone is equally disliked because he is a liberal in the heart of Bush Country and tends to write more left-leaning columns than most sports journalists in the state. Just today, he wrote a column praising the sports labor union. Texas is as anti-union a state there is in the country.

 

The columnists have been a weakness for the DMN for a while. Blackistone is not highly regarded among his peers either, mostly because he doesn't work very hard and isn't very professional. Nor will Cowlishaw be missed. He doesn't write well, rarely has an opinion and never entertains.

 

Have to agree with you on Cowlishaw. Nice guy, but there are too many columns that just make me shrug and say Ok, so what? That's not good for somebody paid to provoke thought or emotion.

 

Standman - I was a left-leaning liberal in the heart of Bush country during college, and I didn't like most of his stuff. I thought he tried to inject race/controversey/the man keeping everyone down into places it had no business being for the sake of a "controversial" column. I also don't think he is a particularly good writer, but that's all a matter of personal taste.

He came in and talked to my class when I was in college, and I could see how people are put off by him in person as well. His whole speech revolved around "what obstacles I overcame to get to where I am." Good for a PR speech, not as appropriate for a group of budding journalists who want to know how to reach the level he's at.

 

Well if he overcame the obstacles, didn't he give you an idea of what it took to reach his level?

Frankly, anybody coming into the business today would have to overcome a ton of obstacles considering the climate of the industry right now. I would be brutally honest to let folks know what they face before entering the business. Then, I would give them a few pointers.

 

Yes and no. In my opinion (and from what I could gather, the opinion of my classmates), it gave us the idea we should be thankful to be white and interested in journalism becuase it would make the path easier for us. It did give us a sense of how people can be really unreasonable, but not of the universal obstacles we'd all have to face.

It was very "me"-centric, in my opinion. Here's my good stories, here's all the people who tried to keep me down, here's why you should be happy people like me are here to blaze the path for you. He spent about 15 minutes complaining about Mark Cuban and his e-mail interview policy too.

Now my 75 minute experience doesn't define him as a person, obviously. It could have just been a bad day. But it certainly affected my view of him and makes me slightly more cynical regarding his columns.

 

Fair enough.

I just think that when it comes to the subject of race, black columnists often are in a no win situation. If they don't address the subject, few white columnists will and an often legitimate issue goes away. If they do, they're accused of writing about black and white isues. A columnist may not write about a racial subject but once or twice a year and when he/she does, the response is "here we go again."

People may look at a situation at say a Kansas State where the Ron Prince is black and mention almost in passing that he is one of a handful of black football coaches around the country and talk about the low number of blacks in that position. But it may be a black columnist who points out that both of Prince's coordinators are also black and that K-State may be the only D-1 school in the country with two black coordinators.

Should it matter? In an idealistic world it shouldn't. But since most assistant coaches moving up to head coach status are coordinators, Prince is doing something to put black coaches in a position other than head recruiter. He is putting them in a position to be a head coach if they perform. When you watch a game on television, they don't point out the stressed out receivers coach in the press box, they show the coordinator and that makes him visible to athletic directors who make the hire.

I guess it's a matter of opinion if that's a case of here we go again or a case of putting things in perspective?