How did THIS make it to print?

Hopefully all this can serve as a guide to those who haven't been in this situation before.

I don't think the the death can be minimized because it involved a team from out of the area. If a fatal accident occurs in your area, you report if just the same if they were locals or just driving through, no?

As for heat, I'll call your attention to Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where last Friday kickoff was delayed an hour because the heat index was too high,Imagine playing in full pads in the desert in August! When Dick Tomey was head coach at Arizona, he held practice at 6 a.m.

 

Um, this was an article published in a newspaper, presumably for public consumption, and that was a private, professional correspondence?

I fail to see the connection. Am I missing something here? Without passing judgment on either one, I don't think they're alike in the slightest.

 

About five years ago, I covered a girls high school basketball game where one of the coaches had a heart attack on the floor with about five minutes remaining in the game. He had to be revived via defib.

The orders from my SE were simple: write 8 inches on the game, I don't care if you don't use any quotes and then get to the hospital to find out as much as you can. My story about the coach ran on 1A. My story about the game ran on the bottom of sports. The idea of combining the two never crossed my mind and never crossed my SE's mind.

This story is just horrendous.

 

I just read the story. I didn't have a problem with the lede, perse. However as the story went on, the writer obviously made the mistake of trying to mesh the two together which resulted in a poorly written story. He could've kept the lede and then went into what happened to the coach, or, gone into the game with quotes from those saying how difficult it was to play under such circumstances.
I don't know if the person who wrote this reads SportsJournalists.com but I hope he takes the criticism given here and learn from it. Some of the criticism have been constructive. Some have been brutal.

 

Obviously, this was handled wrong, but as we all know the ability of stringers covers the entire spectrum of quality. some can't really write at all and depend on the office to clean it up. Basically, they know how to collect game facts and that's about it. others are semi-professional journalists who are great and don't need any direction at all. we can probably figure out which category this correspondent falls into. I'd bet he gets paid about $25 or $30 per game.
the blame is on management but knowing that situation, there are some other things that come into play as well. There's a good chance the entire staff was out covering games and Gadsden ships its stuff to be printed in Rome, Ga. that results in ridiculous deadlines. This story might have gotten a cursory read, thrown on the page and sent. And trust me when I say this, at NYT shops, these days is mostly about hitting deadline and less about the quality. not defending anyone or anything, just stating some facts.

 

Very, very true, 2under, but there still had to have been somebody in the office to make a decision. Even if the SE is out covering games, a news editor or somebody with the authority to say "break this out."

That is, if the stringer even knew -- or let anybody else know -- before four minutes to go in the fourth quarter. Which is a big if.

 

You would think so, especially on a football Friday night. It's not like this happened at a volleyball game on a Sunday afternoon or Wednesday night when the office is usually bare.

 

In fairness to the writer of this story, these kinds of stories are the hardest ones to fuckin' write. To me, the easiest way around it is just like some people have said. Don't combine the stories. Make it a sidebar or something. The only way it should be mentioned in the gamer is something like "Smith defeated Jones 20-13 in its first game since the passing of its coach John Hancock." Besides coaches and teachers have always said and emphasized, the game is not about them, it's about the future generations and the kids. That's the way they would want it. Just my thoughts.

 

Hack, you're singing in my choir. There's no question the person writing the story got caught up in what was happening. However, SOME ONE should've been on the desk reading the story and saying, "hmmm, I think we need two stories here."
I blame the desk, because more than one set of eyes should've seen this story, more than I blame the writer, who by all accounts wasn't experienced enough to handle the story.

 

By the way, if no one at the Gadsden Times was thinking Friday night, what the hell does it say that the story is still on the web site as of Wednesday at 6 p.m? Get the freaking thing off, or change the lead or something.

 

Excellent point. I think they are asleep.

 

We encountered a similar situation at The (Hilton Head) Island Packet in 2002, when a player from a visiting team collapsed on the sideline during a basketball tournament hosted by a school in our coverage area. It was an awful experience — awful for the coaches and players, awful for the fans, awful for us. I remember vividly pulling my reporter into a conference room when she returned from the game to calm her down and coax the story out of her. She was sitting near the kid when he collapsed, and she got a very graphic look at what happened to him. (She did a highly professional job all night (we were in contact by cell phone), and I think the emotion of the event caught up with her when she got back to the newsroom.)

Here's the link to the live story:

http://www.lowcountrynewspapers.net/archive/node/118896

My other recollections of that night:

• The reporter called me soon after the player collapsed. He wasn't pronounced dead until after he arrived at the hopsital about an hour later, though, and it took us a while to confirm the news. We had to work phones for a while, calling the hospital, the AD, etc. The kid's family wasn't at the game.

• I think we noted the score of the game when play was stopped, but that's the only way in which it resembled a sports story.

• The story moved out to 1A. Incidentally, it didn't lede. Sea Pines developer/Verizon Heritage founder Charles Fraser died in a bizarre boating accident the same day and was the centerpiece.

• We followed up the next day and had a few more stories about the incident over the coming weeks. The next year, we previewed the tournament with big take-out (longest story in newspaper's history) on the kid, his family and the people from our community who reached out to them in the past year.

• BTW, we didn't really do anything special with coverage in terms of breaking the story on the Web. We would do it much differently now — breaking updates, Twitter notices, et. all.

Difficult as it was for us, I think the folks in Gadsden had it more difficult. The death we had to report happened a little after 6 p.m., well before deadline, and all basketball action ceased. We did have to keep track of sources in different locations and didn't get all the information into that first-day story we wanted, but at least we were able to focus on the real story and make adjustments to the lineups.

I'm satisified with our handling of the story, but like I said, it was an awful experience.