Ed Werder doesn't like women helping women

[Ice9]

How is that?

That Tweet is from last week. Not sure that qualifies as "aged."
And I am not seeing how it's ... ... whatever it is you think it is ... Can you explain? Not trying to be a trite or anything, just curious.

You guys have been following the news with Kellen Winslow, right? Am I on the right planet?

 

[Big Circus]

You guys have been following the news with Kellen Winslow, right? Am I on the right planet?

My bad. Didn't know original tweet was referring to Winslow - I had it in my head it was somebody else. Yeah, that's bad.

 

[Alma]

Her columns are lazy and put me to sleep, and her Twitter is out of control. Not in a good way. Like, for someone who thinks she's the coolest/funniest/wittiest kid in the room, she overreacts to stupid inane tweets A LOT. Incredibly sensitive for someone who really ought to be above this stuff.

I don't really blame her. Or most young journalists. They overshare and over-emote on devices. It's so hard-wired into who they are I'm not sure they know how to stop. I blame their bosses.

 

[playthrough]

I think Werder woke up on the wrong side of Twitter this morning. He comes off as a guy still bitter about his job status. Can't say I blame him. But, that doesn't make him right.
At least Wilder ended things after a few tweets.

I felt bad for how things went down for Werder too (and went down for many others). But you can't troll someone making an innocuous comment about an entry-level job. Like most dips into the Twitter cesspool, there's zero upside.

 

[dirtybird]

Ed Werder might just stay a restricted free agent after that little Twitter dust-up. Foolish, foolish stuff.

Not knowing who Charlotte Wilder really was, I found that her promotion to senior writer at SI has been nothing short of meteoric.

A Q&A with Charlotte Wilder of SB Nation on her climb up the journalism ladder and writing about the "fringes of sports."

The landscape has changed so much that I don't know if this career bushwhacking approach would work today, but six years ago (2011) it did — based on my blog and freelance work, America's Test Kitchen hired me as a web editor for its TV show and its two magazines, Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country. I was there for about two years, then Boston.com hired me as a general reporter in 2014. USA TODAY Sports became aware of me and hired me away from Boston.com in March 2016 (when I officially became a sportswriter, I guess), and then SB Nation hired me away from USA TODAY after seven months. I've been at SB Nation since November 2016.

From later in the piece:

Well, until I worked at For The Win, I wasn't a sportswriter. They kind of took a chance on me — Nate Scott, who's a fantastic editor, was there at the time, and he vouched for me, even though I don't think I even knew who James Harden was at that point. My background is in culture writing and general reporting; I wasn't really a huge sports fan before I entered this world. I liked sports, and I understood sports, and I played sports, but I wasn't immersed in the news cycle. I didn't really pay attention or watch that many games, to be honest. It was kind of a leap of faith to make the jump into this field. Learning the characters, the narratives, the storylines of this insane industry was like drinking from a fire hose those first six months; it kind of felt like getting a master's degree in sports. I'm up to speed now, but at the beginning I was like… who the heck is D'Angelo Russell and why is Nick Young mad at him and what does this have to do with basketball? My editors at FTW were very patient with me as I Googled every single person in the news hits I had to write. And I'm sure I still sounded like a total moron early and often in the beginning.

She must be an awfully talented, right-out-of-the-box gifted writer to pull that off. I'll have to start reading her work more.

SI has had a recent pipeline of quirkier SBNation writers. They grabbed Holly Anderson, Martin Rickman and went hard after another writer that I'm not sure how public it is.

 

[dirtybird]

Yeah I dunno. Maybe. I thought SI laid off some young writers, too, in the last round, but maybe not.

Werder's biggest mistake was picking on someone so innocuous and kicking up a liberal hornet's nest on Twitter. You'll never win there.

I'd argue it was showing that level of, for lack of a better word, butthurt on twitter. He's an accomplished 58-year old journalist. He can act like one.

 

[playthrough]

You guys have been following the news with Kellen Winslow, right? Am I on the right planet?

I confess, I hadn't heard anything on Winslow ... but damn. Might be going up the river for a very long time.

 

[cjericho]

If he goes on the witness stand hope he tells them

 

[Alma]

I'd argue it was showing that level of, for lack of a better word, butthurt on twitter. He's an accomplished 58-year old journalist. He can act like one.

He's claiming butthurt on behalf of young male sportswriters that he teaches. Which I don't personally buy.

 

[Azrael]

 

[dirtybird]

He's claiming butthurt on behalf of young male sportswriters that he teaches. Which I don't personally buy.

That seems not great. "How can I stand before the youngs and tell them it'll be fair when they try to go job hunting?"

If you got canned like he did and are explaining the kids need to know they'll get a fair shake ... I got nothing for him.

 

[Alma]

Mina Kimes, who is very, very good, was nevertheless a Bloomberg News reporter before ESPN hired her.

I think it's possible that very good women sportswriters are being overlooked on every level. But, shoot, Wilder and Kimes do not make that case. They jumped from non-sports reporting right into good sports jobs that have become great sports jobs. If we want to say "well, heck yes, and many more are needed before it's ever remotely equal," that's fine, but I don't think either one of them got a bad turn here.

*In my own personal experience* - which was not in a major market - there was long a desire and effort to get women and people of color into jobs. Often, there were just...no bites. Or few bites. Talented women and people of color just got better jobs, in bigger markets, quickly, from media organizations with the money and interest in improving the diversity of their voices. This was often true when I worked for awhile with students who wanted internships. Women, on the whole, did well there.

Is there a bias against women sportswriters that makes it hard for them to get jobs? Maybe there is at a higher level than I ever worked or a lower level. At my level, that didn't seem to be the case.

This is always tricky stuff, and it's going to get trickier as we go on. Because white men have dominated the field. And it's possible more white men will expect to do the same. And there will be white men left out. And that's just going to be the way it is. And, from a societal POV, that's how it has to be. One way or another, tho, someone's getting left out. And that's never something anyone enjoys, even if the right people, demographically speaking, are getting cut from the business.