How do you deal with another reporter lying about you?

I threaten to hang out with them.

 

Two stories, one of which may out me to those familiar with it:

* Many years ago, I was an agate clerk for a big metro paper. The paper's shit-for-brains high school writer continually blew off assignments. One night, the desk was waiting for a notebook, and when it became obvious the story wasn't coming, the supervisor called this guy at home. "Oh, hey, I called in and told Bump_Wills I wasn't writing. Didn't he tell you?" He never spoke to me. He got his a few years later, when he was actually caught filing a story on a game he didn't attend. Sweet justice.

* Maybe a decade later, I'm on the desk at another metro on the other side of the country. A baseball beat writer -- now a VERY big name -- files a story on deadline in which he gets the name of the team's catcher wrong; he confused it with a similarly named pitcher. No big deal, but because we're railroading copy in for the first edition, it's missed by the desk, too. We make the fix for subsequent editions, but unfortunately for this guy, the early edition is the one that circulates where the team is. He catches a lot of shit about it from team officials. Finally, he whips out his laptop, pulls up the story (which he has corrected!) and shows it to them, saying, "I had it right and the desk fucked it up." Heard this from a competing writer on the beat.

Lovely.