Today on Stringers Gone Wrong ...

This guy was actually a newside reporter who was stringing/working for sports. He was terrible.

Most of the ones who lasted more than a month were good.

 

It's always a mixed bag with stringers. I guess I've just been blessed to work with some great ones. News guys doing sports is always comedy gold to me, especially the ones who make fun of us as the "toy department."

 

My favorite bad stringer story is the day I was sitting in the media room at the local LPGA tournament. This guy somehow gets access to the room, sees our paper's namecards and asked me if I was the sports editor. Told him no, I wasn't, but the SE would be out later. He said he had called the SE about doing some freelance stories for us at the tournament. I told him, no, we were just using our staffers for the tournament, no freelancers. That's when he pronounced himself better than anybody we had on our staff. (During that stretch, we won the Triple Crown, a bunch of APSE top 10s and a bunch of other awards). Fast forward to fall and we took him on as a stringer for prep football. Before his first game, he was instructed to call us with the score after each quarter and file his story by 11 p.m Come Friday night, no calls .... we tried to call him, but the never answered. We never got a story, either. Our ASE reaches him early the next morning and the guy said: A) He didn't think it was right to answer his phone while the game was going on and B) he would have his story to us by 11 a.m. So much for that stringer ....

 

The day I turned down Newsday to write an A-Rod rehab story because I already had commitments at NBA Summer League was my last great freelancing moment.

Outside of high school football and the occasional Magic game, freelancing is not worth the drive time anymore.

Hell of a run, though. If you ever hired me, thanks for putting up with me.

 

Oh Lord yes. A neighboring paper would rotate reporters every now and then, where, say, a sports guy would cover business for a few weeks and someone cityside would try sports. Sports guys kicked ass wherever they worked, of course. But after a couple of very bad gamers on the local minor league team - stuff you wouldn't even want to put in your high school paper bad - from metro writers got into print, I sat by one of their regular sports guys at an all-star football game and asked about it. He told me "you should have seen the raw copy" and shook his head.

 

My favorite experience with a news stringer covering sports was the one who was assigned to a high school softball game out of desperation and took gender neutrality to an extreme, turning in copy that referred to the "first base person" and "second base person" (at least one news copy editor I worked with also was known to make those types of changes when she occasionally had to handle sports stories).

 

Only bad stringer we had was a our dirt track guy. He came in and offered himself to the SE, because of the "lack of coverage."
He did two, maybe three stories. They were essentially the same stories and interspersed with double-entendres for dicks and sex.

 

Telling a person at the paper that you are better than any writer at the paper is a pretty good indicator that the person lacks st least a half-dozen skills necessary to do the job.

 

You're welcome, "Byline."

 

Ha! Guess you're lucky they didn't say first base, equally good base and tries just as hard base.

 

Reminds me of the time my late ME at my stop in Florida decided he'd help us by covering some youth baseball. First, a little background.

He was always blasting us for our "insufficient" coverage, even though all three of us in the sports department were covering a game a night, every night, all summer long. He'd tell us the section, filled with youth baseball "looked like crap yesterday" and then praise us the next for our great section the next day, still filled with youth baseball. I'd get emails from folks begging us to put anything else but youth baseball in the section. Since he had a couple of sons playing, all he heard were the complaints from the other parents, which he of course passed on to us.

Imagine a summer of this. In the Florida heat, enduring three hour drives every single day, five, six, hell, sometimes seven days per week to cover these stupid tournaments. In south-central Florida, summer is the rainy season and games would be hit by constant weather delays, so you wouldn't get home until 3 or 4 in the morning. It was hellish to say the least.

Back to the story, our ME drives three hours to cover his son's game and gives me a hard copy of his story the next day. He's so excited and almost giddy, so much so that he jumps up and down like an organ grinder monkey. I start to give it a read over.

"Well how was it?" he asks, a ridiculous grin plastered over his face. Let me tell you, it was total garbage, lots of cliches, too much play by play, etc. The quotes were also dreadful, derivative and didn't help tell the story at all.

Our young stringer, who wasn't even a senior in high school, knew more about sports writing than a 20-year veteran of news and it showed.

I wanted to say something snarky, but I told him thanks, rewrote his copy into something useful and never spoke of it again.

 

Why would you cover youth baseball tournaments? I can see American Legion or Little League once they get to playoffs, but actually driving to cover AAU tournaments or whatever? That's crazy.