Rick Maese in Japan

Agree completely.

 

If memory serves, Rick covered one of the shuttle disasters when he was in Orlando. I don't think there's any event out there that he couldn't cover.

 

This post is dumb on many levels, but mostly it's dumb because it takes something that's actually happening -- a nuclear power plant failure after an earthquake -- and equates it with something not actually in play at all here, a high school gamer. As if a preps reporter who found himself in this situation would be inspiring this kind of commentary.

Rick was a general assignment reporter when he was a fricken teenager in Albuquerque. He was a top notch feature writer and GA in Orlando, then a metro columnist. He was the lead columnist in Baltimore in his late 20s, and has covered four Olympic Games. In 2008, he spent several months covering the presidential campaign for the Sun. For the last two years he's been covering what I would argue is the most competitive beat (the Redskins) for one of the nation's most important papers, the Washington Post.

The point being made was not that any high school preps reporter could cover any nuclear disaster, it was that a great reporter is a great reporter, period. And sports people who can handle deadline pressure are all the more valuable because gathering a ton of information in a short period of time and boiling it down quickly to make it readable for a large audience is what we do day after day, night after night.

 

+1 ... and if the poster had taken a look at the Post's web site, like I did, he would have found Maese doing just that, the people stories, and those with expertise in the nuke issues were doing those stories.

 

"I'm not a sports writer; I write about people who play sports."
-- Bill Lyon, The Inquirer

 

Maese's stuff is great. We subbed in his story after the first edition because it was better than the other options.

I wouldn't generalize about sports vs. news, though. Brilliant people and complete idiots on both sides. But I would guess, pretty safely, that I've encountered a lot more people in sports who never read their own newspaper and are off in their own narrow little world, with zero clue about what's going on in the rest of it. I worked for a publisher once who described one of our sports writers as being "probably the dumbest person in the building -- we have people on the loading dock who are smarter than he is." I didn't know any of the people on the loading dock, but it wouldn't have surprised me if the publisher had been right. Because I would not generalize about the people on the loading dock, either.

 

A great piece from Kindred on Maese's experience.
http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/doing-what-good-sportswriters-do-in-once-in-a-lifetime-conditions/

 

Good point. You should dust off your nuclear disaster reporter and send him/her in that case.

 

Well said about generalizations. Agree with this. I wouldn't trust some of my colleagues with a tennis tournament, let alone a city council meeting.

 

There are a lot of former sports folks who work in news, and I really hate it when someone assumes that everyone who covers politics, business and breaking news simply cannot cut it in sports.

 

You're making the same generalization in the other direction, are you not?