Do you read your newspaper?

I got in trouble at a past gig for not reading the paper.
Ran a story in sports about those Chunky Soup commercials with NFL players.
It had been the lead story in biz a couple of days earlier.
It had ran on a day I was off, and those were the two days I didn't read the paper then.
Good times.
Now, I skim A and read Metro, Sports and Biz, glance at features.

 

I read the sports section every day and most everything else, plus the competition's sports page. And I can't agree more with I'll never tell's post about reading your own stuff to catch your mistakes. That, more than anything, has helped me clean up my copy.

 

Occasional pretentiousness is generally excused from you, because you're usually beyond reproach.

But wow...that was REALLY pretentious.

(And I'm still not going to read A-9.)

 

Shot, we do not exist in a vacuum. We need to know what's happening in our communities beyond the playing field. Not knowing that makes us bad journalists.

Just the other night, some dolt saw something on the wire and asked if we were going to have anything on it. The story was only on fucking A-1 that morning.

 

Frank, all I can say is that we DO exist in more of a vacuum than you believe.

 

Maybe you do, Shot, but I fucking live here -- I am not a guest. And neither are our readers.

 

Reading the other parts of the paper got me familiar with the community where I work. I'm not from here, and I live out of the circulation area, so reading the paper -- almost -- cover to cover was and is a necessity. Since I mostly work in preps, it's good to see when a player I cover gets in another section. I then can use that as an icebreaker, which tends to open up a shy kid to the first real question.

 

If I haven't already read the stuff in the system the night before, I read our paper in the morning. I also read my local paper in the morning. The one thing I don't do is read our feature section. It has about as much relavance to my life as steam heat does to a Somali.

 

Thank you.
Today, for example, we had a story about casinos. So -- I read it. Or if the education reporter has something on the school I cover -- I read it.
County/City council, etc.? I don't really give a crap.

 

Yes, every day I grab a paper when I come into work, and reading through it one of the first things I do.

On that same note, I am shocked by the number of colleagues who do not read the paper on a daily basis.

 

1A, 3A (local news), 4A (editorial), all of sports (unless I did most of the pages that night)

 

Now that the point has somewhat been made -- that reading the entire paper is a highbrow bragging point -- the truth.

I read the local front, most of living and the editorial page. In addition to sports. Any local news which might have a coaching change, too, inasmuch as we can't count on our news reporters to pass it along to us as a matter of course.

And, of course, the obits.

It is truly rare that I read A-1 stories.

Latest story on gas prices? I'm going to be paying it whether it goes up, down or stays the same.

Rendell vs. Swann? I'm sorry, some of you will disagree, but the result will make little difference in my personal lifestyle. I just get pissed off over the negative campaigning and tune them both out.

Unrest overseas? I've read it before.