When part timers go bad

Sad to say, I've seen worse. But you should at least get the score someplace in, say, the first four paragraphs.

Well, you get what you pay for. Let this serve as a harbinger of things to come with "citizen journalists".

 

WTD, not to assume, but if you ask this, you haven't been trying to get a body at 27 high school football games on a Friday night.

 

It's one of the first things that happens, so of course it's going to be early in the story.

 

That story certainly sucked. It's what we'll be seeing from citizen journalist sportswriters
only they'll be at much more important events.

By Citizen Journalist
The Chicago Bears thrilled the world Saturday in Cutler's debut, throwing the football all over Soldierss' Field and completing a 42-17 win over the Baltimore Stallions.
(of course the score will be wrong and all facts will be wrong too by the citizen journies. Part timers tend to get facts wrong.

 

fair enough!

 

I don't like posting the story. We have all ran into poorly written stories, and I dare say, have done them myself. Writing is hard and soccer is difficult.

It's just not classy or professional to post it. Sorry, the story wasn't good, but it isn't the most awful thing I have seen submitted. How the hell can anyone complain about the work of a part-timer? You get what you pay for, and, who hired the guy in the first place?

 

Exactly. As awful as this is, try working with a volunteer stringer.

 

Damn. I thought I was cutting it close when I clicked on the "See Heather Graham's bra-less picks from NY."

 

We had a stringer go to one of our outlying towns for a basketball game, and he misspelled the town's name on every occasion in the story, two different ways. Neither way was anywhere close to the actual spelling of the town, and the two different spellings he did go with weren't even all that close to each other.

I would've been pissed, but I was amazed at how incredibly inaccurate it was. To this day I haven't seen anything like it.

 

Since we've got "Death of a Racehorse" posted, I see nothing wrong with posting this. The guy's name isn't there. It's a fine example of "how not to."

 

This story looks familiar. We had an intern who wrote this bad, if not worse. We had to almost completely rewrite his copy on a daily basis and he never got any better even with constructive criticism.

 

Where I used to work, there were stringers whose copy would start off okay but totally degenerate as you read it. It was like the inverse pyramid but, instead of the most important stuff at the top, that's where what good spelling and grammar there was in a piece could be found.