What do you think of this Plaschke gimmick?

I think the beginning would have made a good/great lead.

But after a few paragraphs, it started to feel childishly obstinate.

I thought it reflected badly on the writer.

I would have preferred that he'd taken his anger and directed it at making team members explain why they played so lazily.

 

"It's a 48-minute game," Bryant said. "We've got to play a full 48 minutes."

Yup. That would have just *made* the column.

Put me in the camp that it was "cute" but not "brilliant," but I'd rather someone take a shot like this than give me something I've already read before.

 

Me too. It's something different that readers will get to laugh about.

I wonder if some of the haters are the ones that are pissed because he goes on the WWL to jibber-jabber.

 

Different often scares people in the newspaper business.

 

Without the fix, there's an assumption that someone somewhere actually is addressing the plight of talented unemployed sports journalists and making quality judgments, pulling the good ones from those ranks while leaving their lessers to scrounge and quake.

Your previous sentence, Piotr, shows you get that. Again, "remain" has nothing to do with it. Unemployment in the newspaper business is very much a permanent condition now for many, and how good they were or weren't when they were actively working -- many were quite good enough to earn those paychecks -- is beside the point.

Red Fucking Smith could be out of work right now and, if some Web site or the WWL didn't think he appealed to a target demographic or simply was watching its dollars and cents, it wouldn't matter how good he was for his former newspaper.

 

I would say judging from the responses in this thead the "gimmick" worked. Seems to be split right down the middle, with MANY strong opinions on both sides.

I liked it myself. Thought he made his point in a clever way.

 

This is a journalism board, though. When someone posts a topic, people here discuss it because that's what we do here. That doesn't necessarily mean it will get readers talking about in a similar manner -- there's no reason to presume that the readers who dislike it will be passionate, or even analytical, in their dislike. The people who don't like it may just shrug and dismiss the column, the columnist and the newspaper as total horseshit, especially if they aren't regular readers. Joe DiMaggio used to say that he played hard every game because there was always going to be somebody paying to watch him for the first time.

 

I think it probably works the opposite way. We tend to nitpick things on this board that wouldn't even occur to a normal reader. Hell, there's like a three-page thread on use of the phrase "first-ever." No reader gives a shit if we use that phrase, but there are apparently very specific reasons why we don't.

With the Plaschke column, readers will either chuckle, or they won't, and they'll go on with their lives without really giving it a second thought.

 

Yeah. I wonder how many times Plaschke said to himself "Boy, I really hope other writers like this piece" while he was writing it? I'm guessing zero.

 

Jaded-columnist idea executed pathetically.

 

I think the fact that the thread title refers to "Plaschke gimmick" as opposed to "column" syas it all. A gimmick that failed.

And to those who think Grizzard's "Frankly, I don't want to talk about it." was daring and brilliant...try totally unprofessional fanboi homer bullshit.