No, you CAN'T root in the damn press box

[Slacker]

Yeah ... no. Stick to the arts.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette's Senior Arts Journalist, and a former longtime Deputy Sports Editor for The Denver Post. He compiled this list with some assistance from his brother, Kevin.

LOL.

 

[Equalizer]

Once I ceased working in one-man shops, the edict from the sports editor was clear. One high school per sport was allowed to make a postseason run for the sake of something interesting to cover. Everyone else was to be eliminated as soon as possible. If you came back to the office after covering a team whose season just ended, you were feted as though you had just conquered Gaul. And woe to the writer whose team lived to fight another round.

1. I, too, root for the clock.
2. I had a similar policy. It was OK for one team to make a run. Two or more? No.
3. If a team made it to the state tournament, it better win the championship. No going there to get lit up by 40 points in the opening round.
4. My newsroom nickname for the kids who qualified for state track only to finish 16th out of 16 runners was "start-and-parkers", like in NASCAR.

 

[Octave]

I quietly cheered for a good game to write about. No forks given about teams or how long or short it took.

I am also still wondering why Stephanie Ruhle has not been fired. (Narrator: She won't be.)

 

[HanSenSE]

There was this epic thread too.

Cheering in the Clemson pressbox | SportsJournalists.com

 

[MeanGreenATO]

The good news I can't think of any issue at Penn State where the vast majority of the press corps sporting pom poms could become a problem.

I remember when I was at a journalism conference several years ago and Sara Ganim went scorched earth on the Penn State media and said sports writers couldn't do crime reporting and just ate and looked at stat sheets. She was promptly ratio'd on Twitter.

 

[Azrael]

I remember when I was at a journalism conference several years ago and Sara Ganim went scorched earth on the Penn State media and said sports writers couldn't do crime reporting and just ate and looked at stat sheets. She was promptly ratio'd on Twitter.

"couldn't" or wouldn't, she wasn't wrong.

 

[playthrough]

She was wrong. Of course there are some scribes who are lazy and don't want to go near that but there are others who could absolutely leave the press box tomorrow and become full-time crime/courts writers.

 

[Azrael]

She was wrong. Of course there are some scribes who are lazy and don't want to go near that but there are others who could absolutely leave the press box tomorrow and become full-time crime/courts writers.

In specific reference to Penn State - which is the quote I'm answering - she was absolutely right.

 

[playthrough]

In specific reference to Penn State - which is the quote I'm answering - she was absolutely right.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah in hindsight that's fair.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

I'll never forget seeing that for the first time while on a tour of a Gannett shop. The homepage production area looked like Mission Control with the stacks of monitors and the data. Fast-forward to today and I'm in a job where I also watch web hit data all day, but I don't manipulate stories like it was explained to me there. Eh, maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Memories of that setup from my Gannett days haunt me to this day. We were shedding staff, cutting travel and freelance budgets to the bone, as they are putting up a huge bank of big flat-screen TVs as a "leaderboard", and a corporate boot-licker was all hardcore about, "We want you guys to fight for page views! Get in each other's faces when you are ahead of them on the leaderboard! This is like the Hunger Games, and if you want to be here, you need to be at the top of those rankings!" And you could easily tell who had aspirations on being the next corporate bullshirt artist, because they would spend lots of their time just sitting in front of those banks of TVs, studying the leaderboard and pretending to take notes, then calling individuals into a conference room for closed-door meetings.

And calling it "clicks" was grounds for punishment.

forking heck on earth.

 

[Azrael]

second place is a set of steak knives

 

[Alma]

Memories of that setup from my Gannett days haunt me to this day. We were shedding staff, cutting travel and freelance budgets to the bone, as they are putting up a huge bank of big flat-screen TVs as a "leaderboard", and a corporate boot-licker was all hardcore about, "We want you guys to fight for page views! Get in each other's faces when you are ahead of them on the leaderboard! This is like the Hunger Games, and if you want to be here, you need to be at the top of those rankings!" And you could easily tell who had aspirations on being the next corporate bullshirt artist, because they would spend lots of their time just sitting in front of those banks of TVs, studying the leaderboard and pretending to take notes, then calling individuals into a conference room for closed-door meetings.

And calling it "clicks" was grounds for punishment.

forking heck on earth.

Slight counterpoint: Unless operated by a non-profit, the newspaper is not always a knick-knack shop full of hobgoblins pursuing whatever arcane stories they fancy. It's nice that Eric the sports editor likes college hockey; spending 30 of a GA's 40 hours writing stories that fewer than 1000 people read is not necessarily the best use of resources. What used to be "our coverage is driven in part by those who complain about what we didn't cover" has changed to "those three people who called were 3 of...322 people who read the last story."

But the monitors and stats have been misused, yes, especially in that hunger games fashion. What they usually say is: Good features, columns and sports always do well, as does consequential hard news coverage. Save the meeting blow-by-blow for Twitter; write substantial hard news.