Question about Sports Xchange

Shit I would have killed for that deadline. My deadline was mid-afternoon Sunday and my conference played at least one Sunday game. If I had a Tuesday deadline, I would have considered continuing it.

 

I, like Moddy, was one of the people who didn't get paid for a month's worth of work back before the reorg.

Other than that, things were fine.

 

did reports for them for several nfl seasons. never missed a payment.

but it was time-consuming and not worth the money. if it's just doing occasional freelance stuff for them, i wouldn't hesitate if the money is right.

 

I'm going to sound like one-note Johnny, given my Sports Publishing woes, but my experience was the same as Moddy's. I did hockey notes for them in the first Internet boom. It was time consuming and if you figured out the hourly rate, the pay was not great but the cheques were regular and they added up. The Canuck buck was also 1.40 U.S. back then.
After doing that for a while, they asked me to be a regular contributor in the NHL playoffs - notes plus a daily column - and the money really started coming in. My tax returns never had higher numbers than from about 1998 through 2000.
Then Cooney sold out to the dot-com assholes and I got stiffed for about five grand. The company wound up in banruptcy and I ended up getting around $700. The last cheque just came a couple of months ago. Dunno why you didn't get anything Moddy, but I made sure I was on the list of unsecured creditors.
Even after all that, I wasn't really angry with Cooney because he seemed up-front about the problems and a mutual friend told me Cooney got screwed, too.
But when the company started up again, I changed my tune.
They didn't do hockey notes for a few years but when they did, no one called me. The job went to another hockey writer in Toronto. Given the money they pay nowadays for the amount of work involved (the guy is always the last one at the pub after games if he makes last call), I probably would have turned down the gig. But it really pissed me off that they didn't call me about it. I e-mailed Cooney with those sentiments and did not get a reply.
As for attribution of quotes, etc., my experience was it was left up to the writer. There is no way to do that job without using stuff from other sources, so I always attributed it when necessary.

 

One thing I noticed about quote attribution is that it appeared a lot of the non-attribution was done at the paper level, not necessarily by SportsXChange.

For example (and this is an EXAMPLE, not an actual occurrence), it might appear in USA Today without attribution and and CBS Sportsline with it. That kind of thing.

 

well ... that's messed up

because those of us who actually interview people and get those quotes and put them in our stories don't need to attribute them because they're ours

and i've had those quotes show up in these sports xchange reports several times - unattributed, obviously

it's bullshit

 

I always attribute. If they're not attributed, they either came from a) my own interviews or b) the school's web site.

 

Did some work for them for about three years. I was ALWAYS paid on the 15th for the previous month's work.
The check was short one time and it was an honest mistake where I did a fill-in on a team that wasn't normally my beat. They added the money to the next check and all was well.

 

Not condoning it at all. It pissed me off when I saw it with quotes of my own, and, when someone took one of my own SportsXChange items and took it out.

But it does happen. There are some lazy deskers out there that will cut attribution so the story will fit a hole.

 

Same here.

That's a slippery slope, and one I'm especially careful to stay off since seeing a crapload of my quotes stolen and used in Blue Ribbon about 5-6 years ago by the lazy SOB who wrote the preview of the team I cover.

 

College Sports Xchange stiffed me of about $400 when they went belly-up back in the day. I got some incremental payments of about $25 or so every once in a while, but never was paid in full and never will be. I did get a nice computer case that I still use.

What they did do was inflate my income on their bankrupcy filing, saying I earned about $80,000 one year instead of the approximately $2400 I earned. This led to an IRS audit which, thankfully, we escaped unscathed from because we had all the proper financial documentation.

 

I see quotes I got in one-on-one situations mixed in Sports Xchange stuff all the time. And I don't work for them. Slimy, I tell you. Very slimy.