Relaxing summers?

I always kind of hated summers because it was usually harder to get folks on the phone and stuff just seemed to move at a slower pace. I have memories of making calls on 4-5 stories early in a week, getting nothing, and then having all of them call back just at a point when they all need to run the next day to be timely. It left me with a distaste for "we need 1-2 local things everyday," just because it was a lot of stress to scrounge up something without much interest.

I'd rather just chase some of the stuff mentioned above, something different or interesting that can run most anytime.

 

Excellent example of why no one should automatically blow off calls from parents. The way people here complain about them -- especially moms -- you'd think the lot of them were single-minded simpletons who don't deserve the time of day.

Based on what I've seen here, I can visualize thee posts criticizing the mom inital call:
"Suck it up, mom. Your kid missed a foul ball. No scholarship for him."
"Pay attention, junior. There's a warning track, you know."
"Yeah, maybe the kext kid will be smarter than yours."
"But was she a 6?"

Just because a caller spawns offspring and/or lacks a penis doesn't mean the person doesn't have a brain. Yeah, there are some overzealous ones, but hear them out. For better or worse, that's your readership, and if you listen, you can get good information.

(And yeah, I know many sj.comers would deny this would happen and potential reactions, but based on the complaints I've been seeing for 10 years now, it does.)[/QUOTE]

Lots of call-in complaints have some sort of merit, they just aren't newsworthy. The bolded part is what made the call go from a parent complaining to a newsworthy story, not the fact the caller did or did not spawn a child, and or the fact the caller did or did not have a penis.

 

I'm thinking it was an attention-getting device that obviously backfired. The whole thing was not a law enforcement situation anyway until there was violence.

 

The worst is when July 4 falls on a Wednesday or a Thursday. Nobody wants to work one day and then break for the holiday, and then come back for one or two days, so everybody just takes the whole week off. A lot of people go out of town or don't want to be bothered with doing interviews and a photo shoot during their vacation. It's a dead time for everything else except MLB, too.
Which, for us, means we need about 10 days' worth of feature stories in the can and ready to go just to have a prayer of filling out the section. The last time this happened a couple of years ago, I came in on Monday with four or five story ideas and had every single one of them crap out on me because they weren't in town or wanted to wait until they got back to the office the next week. So we had an All-AP front page on July 5. Gotta keep the trains running on time, right? Naturally, a dipshit assistant managing editor came in later that week and berated me for it.

 

Would have nice to tell the ME, "So how many enterprise stories did you have in the news section that day?"

If your shop is like mine, boring parade photos and shaky firework pics filled most of the local news hole.

 

Well, in a fun twist, his over the top rant at me was the last straw in a pattern of harassment. It led directly to him being fired the next day.

 

#Karma