Bad columns/stories from a star

I was reading on the sports board about Reilly's 'Body Parts' column and how terrible it was. I read it, and I must say, I agree that it's far, far below what he's done in the past. But it got me to thinking, how do you deal with that?

Say you've got a star columnist or writer, and he turns in a story/column that is complete crap. How do you deal with that? What should Reilly's editors have done, assuming they also thought it was a bad column?

I imagine telling Reilly "this column just isn't very good. You have anything better?" probably wouldn't work.

 

Work with the person to fix the flaws.

 

That's the thing of it, though -- I can't imagine some of these 'stars' would take well to being 'worked with.' For example, a year or two ago when Albom had that Final Four fiasco where he imagined guys in the stands that never actually attended, and it was revealed that copy editors practically can't touch his work -- how would somebody like that respond to an editor saying "This column just isn't very good. Can you re-work it or give us something else?"

 

With a columnist, it may be hard to do "gimme something else," especially if it's a column off a game. But you can work with the person to minimize the damage. "Gimme something else" would be above-my-pay-grade territory.

 

The instant a writer becomes too big to listen to an editor, that writer risks shitting the bed, early and often.

 

And that happens, all too often.

 

And Jones knows all about that. At least once.

 

Actually, that wasn;t his worst... And I'm not obsessing here, just offering a view.
When the Tigers were in the process of being sold from Domino's owner Tom Monaghan -- who simply lost interest in the Tigers -- to Little Caesar's owner Mike Illitch, it was the worst-kept secret in Michigan.
The Freep had posted several columns over the course of the summer that it was coming. Albom, who had been on vacation most of the summer and missed all the fun, led his column with "I'm back and I have good news." Then went into the fact that -- NEWSFLASH -- the Tigers were going to be sold to Ilitch, a man who cared about baseball and the Tigers when Monaghan didn't. (In fairness, most of the writers around drank that Kool-aid too, so it wasn't just Mitch who got suckered into that nonsense.)
But it came across as "now it's official because I"VE told you."
Might have been his worst column ever.

 

Ages and ages ago, a Phil Hersh column that was obviously done under duress to pimp up the Trib's Holiday Fund or whatever the hell it was they did ...

So bad, I saved it .. in one of the 20 or 30 boxes of stuff I have.

 

That was the most brutal Reilly offering in a long time. And Rushin's wasn't much better

 

To paraphrase a popular quote on the Anything Goes board... this thread is useless without a link to the column being talked about (especially since I didn't read it)

 

Everyone's going to file a stinker sometime, almost never intentionally. If you're editing it, try to stay away from overall judgments, take a step back and try to come up with a couple quick-fix suggestions that might improve it, then suggest them to the writer.