September: Four weeks of hell

Honestly, Stitch, I have no idea. The higher-ups believe they do.

 

One of the issues here is that we have no in-state pro teams, so it makes it harder to pick and choose on the national stuff.

I seriously doubt I can run, say, 15 NFL summaries in Monday's edition. And the allegiances of our readers are so spread out that it makes it hard to pick and choose to run just a few. We've got a local high school alum on one NFL team, but it happens to be the Miami Dolphins, who are about the furtherest away of anyone geographically. Walk around town and you see t-shirts, hats and bumper stickers for at least a dozen different NFL teams. So I've told my editor we either get an extra page and try to run the whole list or we don't run any at all. We'll find out tomorrow which it will be.

As far as other stuff, I never could see the rational behind running events like the US Open some days and not others. Either you commit to running the entire event or you skip it altogether, except maybe the finals. Rest of the year, we only run the finals for various tennis tournaments, but we do try to run the Slams (including agate). Run pro golf and a little bit of car racing (not very important in this neck of the woods, but I do at least run the race results and short stories.) Baseball is the real killer, because it requires a full page almost every day. We committed (against my objections) to running boxscores back in April, so really can't kill it now. UGH!

I fielded a few phone calls and emails over the last couple of weeks from people wanting more of this and that. Bottom line is I realize no matter what we do, someone is going to think we're morons or worse. Oh, well, such is life, I suppose. Just wanted to see how others were handling it.

 

Everybody in Alabama thinks Pee Wee football is king. WTF?

 

About once a week, we get a call or email from some irate reader (parent?) accusing us of giving more coverage to football than soccer, cross country, volleyball, golf, etc. That's true, we do give more coverage to football, rightly or wrongly. Football seems to draw the biggest crowds, their games are on radio, etc. It's sort of a cultural thing. I don't know if it's right or not, but at the moment I'm not willing to spit into the wind demanding equal play for the others.

 

I'm pretty sure you misread what I wrote.

 

The other reason I don't cover anything below varsity is because each of the five schools I cover have between eight and 15 varsity teams playing during a given season. It's all I can do just to cover them. If I write about a subvarsity team it would just give any parents who feel their kids' varsity team is getting shortchanged more ammunition.

 

I'd rather send someone out to cover two volleyball teams battling at the top of the league than a pair of football teams going nowhere on a Friday night. Of course, volleyball is big where I'm at, and our league is weak in football

 

No, no. I got it. And I meant to write: "I have noticed that many people think Pee Wee football is important enough to cover." Kinda just went awry.

 

I would have asked the coach what they were thinking when they scheduled a volleyball match on Friday during football season.

 

Always get people making jokes about the paper, especially when I pass the ticket-taker at the various games I go. But all of us in the newspaper industry are better than that. I don't recall a reporter showing up at their places of work and just go off on how bad their company is.

(BTW: A local journalism professor came into the paper one day and complained about the errors. The copy editor told him basically where he can put the paper. The funny or sad part about the professor is that he moonlights as an assistant manager at Walmart.)