Mystery Meat II said:
swamp trash said:
All I wanna know is:
How do they keep the horses from drowning?
They use seahorses. Duh.
As for the people upset at GBMAD, I'm not sure he's entirely off base. Yeah, the psycho parents are a giant pain and when the publisher/ME/editor capitulates to them, it sets a dangerous precedent and is altogether discouraging. Sometimes, though, I think we go overboard with the venting, particularly if it's something relatively innocuous like running an old photo or wondering (as distinct from demanding) if you could write a story about so-and-so or some such team. They have a kid who does somethig good, they see the paper as an outlet to celebrate it, they contact us. They see the newspaper as something with a function, and they try to use it for that means.
Does that mean everyone who wants a story gets a story? Obviously not. If you're a sports editor, it falls on you to determine what's newsworthy and what's not, using whatever metrics are appropriate for your shop and community. But that doesn't make the parents bad people for trying. They aren't journalists as we aren't mechanics, but I'm sure we'd never complain about other people and how they do their jobs in relation to what we expect, right?
Parents have a duty to advocate for their kin. We (mostly you, since I'm not a FT player anymore) have a duty to weigh their concerns against the spoken and unspoken concerns of your readership. It doesn't make them right. But it doesn't make them the enemy. And there's enough of these HERP DERP THOSE PARENTS SURE ARE ASS HOLES FOR NOT UNDERSTANDING WHAT WE DO type of threads that I wonder if we're not in danger of losing sight of that.
I'd agree with that, except for one thing. It's when people who don't read the paper get all huffy when you explain to them why what they think is a story is not a story, or why, for whatever reason, it may be a story, but you can't do it how they want.
It's when the JV parents whine about why there's nothing in the paper on their unbeaten team. If they read the paper each day, they would see that no JV teams get in the paper. I understood when people asked, because it doesn't hurt to ask, and I would nicely explain to them why.
But when people would get snarky, that's ripe for mocking. Maybe it was the bitchy woman who told me to put my hot dog down and shoot a picture of her son singing the national anthem before the varsity game during the brief time I had 10 hours into a 12-hour day at my first weekly paper to scarf something down, then complained to the publisher when I refused. Or maybe it was getting the "Nice you could make it on time. The JV game started two hours ago." snide comments from clueless dolts with missing teeth who had no idea that I had just come from a varsity wrestling match 10 miles away to cover their 2-10 varsity team's game even though I could have gone home and figured out another way to complete my 40 hours that week. Or maybe it was the jackass who complained that I was going on vacation instead of coming to cover his out-of-our circulation event, even though that vacation was also my honeymoon.
Yeah, there's plenty of nice people out there. Unfortunatly, when their little offspring is involved, some of them forget to be nice. And that's ripe to mock on a message board.
