What's the cringiest thing you've written?

I once wrote a column about how it was ok this girl didn’t win this state high school award because she’d had a season to remember anyway bla bla bla. Wrote in advance for Sunday’s paper as I covered something else Saturday.

I’d talked to her coach all about this Friday when writing. No chance she will win. Not enough points.

Well obviously she did win or else I’d be telling this story in the “what was the most nothing thing you ever wrote” thread.

I learned this exciting and unexpected news early Sunday morning thanks to an angry call to my cell from her mother. Oops.

 

I forget the basis for the story, but one of our reporters called one of the absolute fringe schools in our area and asked to speak to the athletic director. He never confirmed the AD's name and relied on the state directory, which hadn't been updated. So there was the story, quoting AD Joe Blow.. Only problem was, Mr. Blow had gone to the great beyond the previous summer. All I can say is when our guy retired several years later, the huge headline on his going-away page was something like "I'm Joe Blow and I'm still dead"

 

One I really remember is more for the insane reaction I received the next day.

Cops and courts beat, Northern Michigan. Some small-town drug dealer is sought by police for assault and whatever other charges. They tell me, in the evening, that local kid is at large and sought on these charges. We print it.

At some point between my call with the cops and the paper coming out in the morning, local scumbag turns himself in. When I come in later that day, mother of local drug dealer calls and rips me a new one because "my boy was not at large! Your story makes him look like a serial killer!" After asking me if I had a son (he was 1 or 2 then), she ends with, "I hope someday a newspaper prints something that destroys his life!!!"

Too shell shocked to say anything in the moment, but all these years later, I realize what she was really upset about: that her son turned into a drug dealer with a long criminal record. I was just someone she could shriek at about it. Twitter and social media weren't around yet.

 

First gamer I ever wrote for the campus paper.

Used a (terrible) quote for the lede, "I got lucky." While I did mention in the second graf that the quoted player scored the only goal of a soccer game, the story never once included the 1-0 final score.

Another time, working for a two-man desk on a small-town daily, our SE was getting badgered by a grandparent whose grandson played hockey. I'm told to do a feature on him - basically to get the grandpa off the SE's back. Turns out the kid has never been on ice and isn't playing in a league ... he just plays in his driveway with some neighborhood kids. I tell the SE there's no story there ... he makes me publish it anyway. Kid's last name is misspelled throughout the story. Grandpa is furious and demands we re-run the story in its entirety.

One other wasn't my mistake, but a backshop one. We ran football previews on Thursdays with a canned, pre-formatted page. Backshop mistakenly ran the previous week's page. Our phones blew up the moment the paper hit the streets (we were a PM).

 

When I was in Lake Havasu City, someone kept calling the city editor because his daughter had written a book. City editor finally relents. We wrote around the fact she had never been to Havasu.

Biggest backshop good? A retired cop in another city I worked in had the same name as a former sports writer at our paper. Ex cop decides to run for city council and takes out a campaign ad. So we're doing press proofs and the news editor breaks into hysterics. Ad designer grabbed a photo of the ex-sporto, not the candidate.

 

Don't know if this counts, but at the college paper I was highly critical of the basketball coach in his final season -- to the point that he blamed me, the beat writer at the local paper and the radio play-by-play guy for his departure (although the team's 18-game losing streak and 0-16 conference record might have had something to do with it). What I didn't know was that his cousin was a legendary major metro sports editor, and I found out years later that he vowed never to hire me -- and told a few of his friends not to hire me as well. Looking back, just about everything about that situation was cringeworthy, although I did OK in the business despite the legendary sports editor's grudge.

Probably the most cringeworthy error I ever made was when writing a story about a possible minor league pro basketball franchise in the city I was working in. The league commissioner's name was Jim Drucker, but I misidentified him as Sam Drucker (confusing the commissioner with the Petticoat Junction character). Fortunately, my boss saw the humor in the situation and, after a good laugh, did not reprimand me beyond saying, "Let's get it right next time."

 

I've done some winning community sports features in my day, but man, that has to be the best ever!

 

Changed a kid's last name for no reason in a feature.. and then used that name throughout. I never felt worse.

 

Even as a teacher, I'm horrible with names and relied heavily on rosters provided by coaches with players' numbers to keep track of who did what. Often, coaches would forget to include numbers or didn't use full names and other things to make my life difficult. (My favorite was when three kids on a soccer team wore 16 which led me to believe all three were named Jesus)

All that to say, I relied heavily on rosters to do in game Tweeting. Maybe it was me trying to read small type or the coach didn't update numbers but ... when I got out, I was student teaching at a school I covered and one of the stand out softball players was in my class. One day she pointed out how she would do something like get a double or something and would read my tweets after and see I had credited someone else. How it didn't end up in the paper, I don't know, but she gave me crap and it made me think how often I'd done that or how often I'd mess up names in the paper but no one told me.

And see the next post for the one that still gets me up in the middle of the night...

 

In the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, a brother and sister who are local high school golfers, put together a Rube Goldberg Machine (obstacle course) with a putter and a golf ball from the second floor of their home to the basement. It was a byline, sure. It was the cringiest thing I've written about in my more than 20-year career.

 

I've done plenty that I wish I could take back but many of them I don't relive unless I read my old stories. Even the ones that got me yelled at by parents, editors, city attorneys (actually that one was my editor's fault, but I took the blame), etc.

But the one that makes me want to curl up into a ball and rock myself to sleep happened when I was trying out to be an intern at a small daily when I was in my third year of college and one summer of writing experience under my belt. Got sent to the 100th birthday of a local woman. Her family was an there, she had no idea what was going on but she was adorable, food coming out the wazzoo, it was all lovely.

But one of the grandsons told me one of the grandsons who wasn't there was in Metallica. I asked follow up questions but being a huge fan, I'm sure they weren't as probing as I thought. Even asked lady about him and she I'm sure was confused and just nodded along. Later, did a cursory look to see if it checked out, but didn't go very deep. Printed it. No one has ever said anything about it but the more I stew on it and the more I learned about fact checking, the more I realized how many ways I messed up. I'm convinced it was the first time I was truly had in the business and the one that still makes me cringe. Every so often I'll Google names and see if the band member ever mocked a young reporter who claimed his grandma was a woman it wasn't. Never found it. Ugh I need a drink now.

 

I guess you just need to quote dead or fired people for attention! It's actually amazing the way preps have been set up forever with many people covering teams in which they really had no idea about and relying completely on rosters these mistakes don't happen all the time. Or they really do.