When your competition e-mails about middle school coverage

Dear Crazy Lady:
Thank you for your input. We will give your opinion the consideration it deserves. :

By the way, the streets are buzzing about the big kindergarten tiddlywinks tournament coming up next week in Rectal Valley. We are looking forward to your complete coverage.

Once again, fuck you very much for writing.

 

[blue] You should have covered the middle school stuff and forgotten about the prep stuff, so you would have gotten hundreds of e-mails from complaning prep parents.[/blue]

 

That is precisely why most papers I have worked at, or ever heard of, no matter how micro-local, have an iron-clad rule: Nothing below high school level. Nothing.

 

That crazy parent wasn't the only one to complain. I was at a region track meet Thursday and one of the "coaches" of one of the middle school teams walks up to me and asks "Why didn't you all cover our State meet last weekend?"

Me: Check today's paper for full results. And besides, haven't you noticed we've been busy this week?

Him: No, I did not. But those kids try just as hard ...

Me: Walking away, trying not to laugh.

 

Starman, I wish we had that rule. I really do.

When I started here more than seven years ago as a clerk, if someone called in a T-ball score at 10 p.m., it would be in the paper the next day.

Eventually we got to a one-page per week thing. If results/agate (from bowling leagues, soccer, baseball, softball, football, etc,) and an outdoors article from a contributing writer filled the page, we didn't have to run photos.

Now our ME wants us to devote more to youth/rec sports as an over-reaction to that new free monthly publication starting up. Never mind that all there is to cover in this are from mid-June to early August is youth and rec stuff, so for seven consecutive weeks or so, this stuff gets prominent placement.

Our SE wants our assistant (a poster on this site) to devote most of his duties to the youth/rec variety, which will take away from when he need him to cover preps (which he does a good job of). He made my SE prepare some package about how we'll devote more time/space/effort to youth/rec sports to combat our new competitor.

I'd be more concerned with the 36 pages of ads in that thing, but whatever ...

 

Not to long ago, some doofus sent us an email blasting us for not covering a local Catholic school better and for not getting his nephew's name in the boxscore.

This guy was a sports editor at a tiny paper in a neighboring state. He applied for a job at our paper a month later. We laughed at his application. I wanted to bring him in for an interview and ask him, "So you rip us in this email, and now you want to work with us?"

 

You should have brought him in. The look on his face when you asked him that question would have been worth the cost of bringing him there.

 

kingcreole,

Same thing happened here a few years ago.

My SE (who is still the SE) wrote a column about an incident at a high school football game. SE of a neighboring weekly paper in our chain also writes a column, but instead of writing about the incident, writes a column about a column.

Less than a month later, a coworker resigns to move to a different state and weekly SE applies.

His resume went straight into the circular file bin that's emptied every night.

Every time he asked for photos/stats/phone numbers, etc., our ME could never comprehend why we wouldn't help him out.

As of a month ago, he was getting out of the business and going back to school. He applied again ... to be a weekend desker.

 

Believe it or not, I've had the same problem.
There's a Web site that covers two school districts here in town (Big Public High and Small Catholic High), and it has one main writer, who goes out of his way to blast me on anonymous message boards and even our newspaper's forums (I was called dishonest and accused of having no integrity).
Anyway, this jackass e-mails the fucking publisher and asks her why we didn't cover some Catholic school meet that's 45 minutes away (and we're already under the gun to keep expenses, i.e. stringers, overtime and mileage down).
The publisher asks me why, and says I owe him an answer. I tell her what I just mentioned, and threw in that the guy's a rat bastard cocksucker and I don't owe him a fuckin' thing.
I'm not sure it served any real value, but goddammit, I felt good afterward.

 

Fuck track. Fuck you. Have a nice day.

 

The daily in my town, a top 100 metro market, recently added a weekly kids sports page on Sundays. Thankfully, it was done with mostly with added newshole rather than at the expense of something else that actually deserves to be in the paper. They promoted the best part-timer to full-time in order to write the page and some mid-week stuff.

That's the good news. The bad news is that management launched this initiative in a vacuum. They pay no attention to how H.S. sports is generally poorly planned and executed -- you can't cram all of your enterprise/features for a coverage area with 45 high schools into a single weekly page. Coaches in track, wrestling, swimming, etc., who call to complain are branded as trouble-makers even when they have a legitimate beef. The sports staff faces a heavy load of sectional/state championships the next two weeks and also has to start assembling metro all-star teams as well as prepare for the annual Tour golf tournament next month while continuing coverage of minor-leagee franchise in four sports (four-and-a-half if they're not allowed to say "Fuck Title IX.")

The over-reactive publishers and editors who roll out new products based upon what marketing research shows or to counter piece-of-shit launches by alleged competitors should try spending time in the newsroom on a Saturday night watching too few people process too much content in too short a time.

 

UPDATE:

Crazy lady also e-mailed the ME (as a letter to the editor) and sent a copy of said e-mail to the publisher. Crazy lady couldn't understand why our copy desk chief said that the letter wouldn't appear in our paper under her watch. Crazy lady told her loudly over the phone that we were infringing on her freedom of expression.

Youth sports: Never a dull moment!