Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

A sad statement if true, but I can certainly see how it might be.

 

From the "reporting" something that hasn't happened yet department:

When I was a peon part-timer at my second newspaper, I was assigned to remaking an edition that got mailed to far reaches of circulation area outside of Bugtussle, USA. It was an afternoon gig, the paper arriving the next morning to those lucky readers.

There was a World Series game that night and, to have some art with a plug story, I used a big picture of one team's hurler with a cutline about how he "started last night's World Series game (blah blah blah)."

Yep. Rainout.

Lucky for me, I was that part-time peon and none of the bosses bothered to fire me. Learned the phrase "...was scheduled to..." then and there.

 

I once looked into the future and thought we could all make long fruitful careers of this.
Which error in the reading of tea leaves was bigger?

 

I actually liked Kindred's column. I got the sense that he felt uneasy about the whole thing. He was on the fence. He recognized Albom's great contributions yet understood the major mistake.

I think what made it worse -- for me, at least, and it seems Kindred, too -- was Albom's speech. If he had gotten up and said, "thank you.... this is what you should strive for AND learn from my mistake..." I think I would have been OK with it. It would have been an acknowledgement of a mistake along with a well-deserved award.

Instead, Albom got up on his high horse, which he exactly didn't follow, without admitting his own mistake. It all felt very dirty and sleazy and muddled. I think Kindred was trying to point that out. It's certainly how I felt.

How would others feel if Albom had acknowledged his mistake and avoided the high horse? I think I would have been OK with it.

 

"scheduled to"

if you use "scheduled to" when there's any question at all whether the event will actually occur, you're butt is covered

"Curt Schilling was scheduled to start for the Diamondbacks last night in Game 2 of the World Series."

comparing a player not extending a games-played streak because a game in which he actually did play in was rained out, negating the game played, and just conjuring two guys out of the blue and putting them in the stands at an event that they're not even in the same state as ... a bit different

 

your mistake - arrogance - is that you sell the public short. it's not that stupid. people can think for themselves. most won't judge an entire industry based on one columnist.

if you can't see nuance - make distinctions between shades of gray - you're in the wrong business. if you think what albom did is as bad as corruption and conflict of interest you shouldn't be a journalist.

 

As someone who was once victimized by out-right theft -- a plagiarism that resulted in the plagiarizer winning a first-place APSE in column writing at a time when I was still mired at a small paper convinced I'd never amount to anything -- I have always been zealous about this:

There are two capital crimes in our business: plagiarism and fiction.

I have a one-strike policy for anyone who knowingly commits either. That may be Draconian, but it's how I feel.

-- Mike Vaccaro

 

I don't agree with calling the Albom Final Four thing a "mistake." It wasn't a mistake. It was a poor decision by Albom to invent a scene that maybe added a little flavor to his column and that may or may not end up being accurate.

A mistake is when you get a fact wrong, misspell a name, misremember something. Not when your crystal ball is cracked.

 

Perhaps. But he would have started the column at noon and had it ready to send, minus the last graph, at 8:59 p.m.

 

Oh my.

http://deadspin.com/5591618/last-nights-winner-whatevers-left-of-sportswritings-conscience

 

As usual, Craggs nails it. Tommy's one of the few writers I get excited to read. I wish he wrote more like this.

 

Ding, ding, ding.