Early Season Beat Writer Change at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?

More incredible life advice from the single 23-year-old. I can only hope SportsJournalists.com is still around once you begin to have the life experiences that will actually elicit worthwhile suggestions.

 

Wow.

 

Tell me where I'm wrong, then. I don't know why you have such a problem with me that you've got to be a prick just to be a prick, but I don't think anyone here would disagree with what I said. Oh wait, I forgot, I'm only 23 and couldn't possibly have learned anything from watching and listening to people's experience. Silly me.

I'm not the one looking for a fight here. If you want to keep making yourself look stupid, be my guest, but I think this board would be a lot better off if you would just grow up and stop responding to my posts until you're willing to be civil.

 

Hey, I'm perfectly civil. You're the one who slammed me out of nowhere on a thread in which I didn't even reference you. You're the one calling someone a prick and declaring he looks stupid.

Though the idea of a spoiled, entitled, needlessly arrogant 23-year-old telling a board that is filled with people that have been in the business longer than he's been alive how to live its collective life is pretty, well, stupid. I have often thought I'm glad there was no SportsJournalists.com when I was 23 and you are living, breathing proof why I was right.

I look forward to the day you are knocked down a few pegs and actually have something to contribute. You might be a worthwhile poster if injected with some humility. I will not hold my breath.

 

While just about everyone gets taken down a peg at some point in this business, an unfortunate fact is that not everyone responds by learning a bit of humility. As I'm sure our forebears said about our generation when we were in the journalism womb, I find that the more arrogant young ones seldom react to comeuppance or multiple setbacks with anything other than more loudmouth arrogance.

Nighthawk1138 trusts the words of his mentors, and trusts what he has observed. He forgets that many here have lived the things he has only heard about and seen from an outsider's perspective.

 

There's ANOTHER one of them here?

 

Really? That's what you're going with?

Didn't reference me? What the heck do you call that? It's one thing to be a prick, it's another to just flat-out lie about it afterward. You're the one who started this. You didn't have to say anything, and you chose to attack me for no reason.

Look in a mirror. You're the arrogant elitist who apparently thinks that his age alone has earned him something. My "telling someone how to live their life" is merely a thought that has been voiced countless times on this same thread. Nobody, you included, has said anything along the lines of it not being that hard to balance a career and an MLB beat.

So your problem is where the words are coming from. That is idiocy at its highest degree. If the statement is true, who really cares if it comes from a 43-year old or a 23-year old? Can I not learn from others' words and experience? Isn't that part of what we do in this field? Or do you believe that you have to have actually played the sport or covered it for a certain number of years to write anything worthwhile about it?

If you disagree with the statement I wrote, fine. Go ahead and disagree and explain why you disagree. People can benefit from that, you and I included. But taking your attitude that "I'm older than you, you can't possibly teach me anything" is both arrogant and foolish.

Actually, everything you accuse me of is precisely the way you are acting toward me. You are behaving like a spoiled child, and it's pretty sad that someone much younger than you has to point that out. Show some maturity and actually act like you're the veteran you claim to be.

Colin, I wish you the best of luck and I'm sorry your thread got hijacked. That's all I have to say.

 

Mr. Nighthawk

I think the problem here is that you have boldly postulated a "lesson" based mostly on the experience of others. You have not held a full-time MLB beat, not had a family and have declared you have not real interest in a long-term relationship. So this is all second-hand. The lesson also happens to align with a key part of your worldview (no problem with staying single in the long term) that the majority does not follow. It sounds self-serving in some sense, since according to the "lesson," only people such as yourself, who plan on an extended single life, should even think about taking these prestigious jobs. So you can't really boldly throw it out there and not expect some sort of response, especially a rude or sarcastic one.

Then we come to the more complex issue, people considering the speaker as well as the message. It was not long ago you talked about following your heart, and not listening to the old curmudgeons with years more experience. It now sounds like you're listening to experience only when it follows what you think. Furthermore, this lesson, in essence, puts following different parts of a person's dream at odds. You grew defensive when others told you to abandon what you wanted to do. Now you do something similar.

And now we come to a central point, where you boldly ask someone to "Tell me where I'm wrong." In truth you're not wrong. From everything I can gather, having a family and holding a full MLB beat is an often untenable situation. But if you accept that truth derived from others' experience, it opens the door to accepting all the other ugly truths about the business. Jobs mostly pay poorly and often require many extra hours. Great journalists can often lose jobs for bad reasons. The majority who start in the biz leave frustrated, often burned out too young or feeling betrayed by an employer. And for people who don't leave it, many end up bouncing from small town to small town, getting lucky to see a few small shots of big-time work. All of those are real facts about the business. But we don't go around dwelling on them, and similarly, we don't go around openly discussing how we probably can't balance a dream job and an ideal family, should we get lucky enough to land either or both.

I could ramble on, discuss the question of speaking boldly because you're 23 vs. the mild ridiculousness of being told your opinions don't matter because you're 23 (lets face it, there are people on the board who are probably older and still not good sources for advice). I'll try not to. I'm still around that age, and hope not to think of things in such absolutes, despite the preceding post.

Also, not trying to be a dick with the long rambling post. I wanted to explain myself in earnest and hope it came out semi-civil.

 

No, we don't. You know what we do (not necessarily you, dirtybird, but many of us)? We spend extensive time telling everyone who will listen that we never put the job first, that our priorities must be steered away from our profession, that the job will never give you personal satisfaction or keep you warm.

But I can see how that's dramatically different from openly discussing how we probably can't balance a dream job and an ideal family.

Look. All I'm sayin' is that there's no need to jump this kid's ass for saying something that we infer on every other journalism thread.

 

No, you were completely fair here. Truth be told, I wasn't trying to serve myself at all. Personally, I'd put the chances of my landing an MLB beat in the next five years at about one percent, if that. I don't have nearly enough experience to land in a major market yet, let alone get a prime job in one of the 30 markets with a major league team (29, if you limit it to the U.S.).

All I was doing was trying to give a warning to those who want both that if they want a prestigious job, it's best to try to gravitate toward football, basketball or hockey, which have far fewer games than baseball and would be much easier to cover while successfully balancing a family life. My other point was that if your dream is really an MLB beat, you have to really be sure that's your dream, because it might be impossible to achieve it and other things as well. From the experiences of people on here, few would disagree. I was just trying to encourage people who read this thread to really think seriously about the future.

That's why I was surprised I got slammed. What I said seemed perfectly relevant to the thread, in my opinion, and was very similar to the theme of the thread, which was that Colin Dunlap felt he had to make a choice to step away from his beat so that he could put his family first. Others said similar things to what I wrote in more vague language, and I saw nothing wrong with putting it in black and white terms in case someone needed to read that.

You pointing out what I've said before was also fair. I don't expect anyone to believe what I say on blind faith, and I wouldn't want anyone to make that mistake. If someone thinks he or she can pull off both, hey, go for it. Maybe that person is one of the few who can get it done, and if so, good luck to him or her.

A discussion like the one you posed is perfectly rational and makes this thread stronger. I just did not appreciate being attacked for no reason after posting something I thought was perfectly legitimate.

 

Ripping Nighthawk here is exactly the same as the line we all cringe at when it comes from athletes/coaches: "If you haven't played the game, you aren't qualified to make any statements about how it should be played."

Nighthawk may not have "played the game," but he clearly has talked to enough people to understand what he's talking about in this case.

Which is what sports writers do every day.

 

Thanks for the response. I often go into posting (or column writing) guns a'blazing, and step on my own toes in the fervor of debate. Glad to see I didn't come out sounding like too much of an ass.