Orlando

he is a rock star

 

You answered your question, then.

 

gosh, if that's lynn hoppes, yikes!

sorry for not being up on current florida sports execs, but those of us not in the state know that there's much more to ths u.s. than that blip on the radar screen. although it gets quite a bit of action here.

 

1. Why should Lynn Hoppes--or anyone, for that matter--have to report to SportsJournalists.com about anything?? Isn't is safe to assume that the people who need to know what happened actually do know, and the rest of the world (ie, SportsJournalists.com) just wants to know?

2. Regarding the recycling/expanding of newspaper material: If you write it for the paper, it belongs to the paper. Period. If you're going to write books, magazine stories, whatever, based on specific reporting and work that appeared in the newspaper, you have a career death wish if you don't get permission first.

 

Amen, 21, especially to Point No. 2. I wrote something like this five hours ago and no one was paying any attention because people were either slamming Ellers or defending him. Oh, well.

Like I said, I don't know exactly what happened, but if Ellers' story is to be believed, he asked McKenzie about rewriting his Sentinel notes for a freelance job, and McKenzie said, "Yeah, OK, as long as it was printed here first." Like I said, McKenzie is closing the bar in Heaven now and can't defend himself, but I think that could have been the defining moment in this. It was the wrong thing for McKenzie to say.

I almost think the attacks on Ellers' credibility or personality are secondary. If they fired all the assholes in this business . . . well, there would be a lot fewer people around.

 

Elling. Steve Elling.

 

Bond. James Bond.

 

This is completely unfair for me to say but I will anyway because I was thinking it:

Did anyone else find it noteworthy that Elling posted on here to talk about himself but was not part of the army of Sentinel staffers who came on here to praise Van - even though Van admittedly protected him from the higher ups until his death?

 

It's also possible that management was in the process of firing him during all the stuff about Van, and he may have just not felt like posting on here.

Also possible that he's on here under another screen name and posted about Van under it, but felt compelled to defend himself under his own name.

 

Um. Yes. Yes. Yes and yes.

 

Well, write-brained, you got the "completely unfair" part. Talk about parsing a guy's words and actions (non-actions). Especially given how in his post he mentioned it was only the second time he'd ever seen the site.