"You don't support us ..."

The original post is kind of the opposite deal for us. Two years ago, our city had summer collegiate baseball for the first time in 25 years. It's been a pretty big hit. Instead of covering the shit 12-and-under USSSSSSSSSSSSSA tournaments and one of the countless golf tournaments, I get to spend a few lazy summer nights doing baseball. With vacations and desk shift in between, we rarely cover those other events.

 

The biggest problem I have with a lot of these events is that, unlike the high schools and some of the other things (auto racing at the fairgrounds and boxing/mma at the casino), to most groups, "notifying the media" is a phone call the morning the day starts, or my personal fave, the "why weren't you there" call the day after, when you try to explain you can't cover something you didn't even know about!

 

This was years ago, when I was young and extremely poor. I left those shops over a decade ago, actually, on good terms, for all the griping I do on here about them. Mostly, these stories from others trigger those memories for me. The Eagle Scout story, for instance, still pisses me off because it was Exhibit A of a higher-up not backing up his employee.

The publisher at the first shop had the attitude that he wasn't paying much for a reporter, so if one complained, he could just find another one. One day, the longtime secretary made a list of every reporter that had been there. The average time of their stay was something like six months, although a couple got promoted to the editor job. I ended up staying there a year.

The first shop, I found out years later, got busted by the Department of Labor for their unpaid OT practices, and their reporters have to punch a time clock now.

The second shop would pay OT, but would generally grumble about it. Pretty much, if they wanted me to work it, I'd ask them, "Are you paying me overtime for this?" Sometimes they would, and sometimes they wouldn't. If they didn't want to, I stayed home.

 

After reading all of this, I think I'm going to go see a GreenJackets game tonight!

 

It all depends on what the readers and the publisher wants. At my last shop, we covered Legion ball, the local dirt track and rodeo. I doubt more than 25 percent of sports section readers gave a crap about the coverage.

 

The one that kills me is when coaches explain "how it used to be" and how "Former Editor would've done it differently."

Former Editor had a staff of four, plus a couple part-timers. Present Editor has two staffers, who need days off, too.

 

Here we have a semi-pro football team and a swimming team that hosts one or two meets and goes to several others throughout the summer. And then there's all-star baseball in a few weeks.

The semi-pro team we used to cover pretty much every home game they played. They even won a "national" championship last season and a league title back in 2004 that put them on the map -- as much as playing minor league football will allow.

Then they changed their name and quit playing games in our coverage area. Now that they've won their second championship, they're demanding we start covering them again. I run into the team's quarterback every now and then, and he always asks why we don't do much with the team now. Here's my list for him: A. You have less than 30 people show up to each game, and all of them are somehow related to a player; B. You play your home games out of the area; and C. Our readers, outside of the team's fans, absolutely do not care.

 

Get that a lot from readers, mostly: "The old editor went to every Podunk High game, now they're hardly in the paper, but Podunk Tech got big pictures the last two Fridays. Do you have kids there?"

Well, that was all before there was a Podunk Tech. And Podunk was playing at Springfield and Shelbyville, a bit too far to send either a shooter or a reporter and make deadline ... like that matters.

 

I covered a high school tennis match two years ago that had an overflow crowd of about 15 people. A former coach complained about coverage. While I'm there covering a match. Nice touch. I reminded her that was the fourth time I had covered that team that season. She said, "You think that's good?" I said, "Yes I do." Then she said of course that the previous SE had covered "all" their matches. That was an outright lie. I called him and told him what she said and he busted out laughing. Then she asked me where I was during last week's match. Told here I was at a baseball game that had a crowd of 1,200 or so people. She didn't get it. Then I asked her if there were a lot of people who supported the team that didn't come to the matches. Well, of course, she said yes.

Can't argue with a clueless person.

 

In 2005, right after Katrina, things were a mess around here. Our part of the state wasn't damaged too badly, but power was out all over the place. And with as badly as the coast was messed up, people were coming up here to get gas and causing shortages. For a couple weeks there, if you could even find a station with gas you often waited an hour or two in line.

The first week that high school football started back one of our teams was playing a game two hours away. Normally, we probably would have covered it. They're the biggest school in town and have a good following. With all of the chaos going on, however, we opted to stay closer to home and cover a peripheral school that happened to be Team A's division rival. We didn't want to send a reporter that far afield and risk him literally being stranded on the side of the road.
The following week I went to see Team A's coach for the weekly preview story. One of the assistants, who had formerly been head coach and been there forever, lit into me about "how can you ignore us and cover our biggest rival," and "When Billy Cover Everything was sports editor, that never happened!"

Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. Even after explaining why we did what we did, the coach was still grumbling about it. There's just no pleasing some people.

 

I do my best to remember that when they complain like that it's because it means something to them to be in the paper. The alternative is that they don't complain because they don't care if you cover them or not. Being at a suburban chain in the shadow of a massive metro, this is something I encounter a lot. I don't get as many complaints as I expect, and I wonder if it's because being in our paper is like a consolation prize to them.

If you go to a restaurant or deal with a sales staff at some business and don't get the type of service you've gotten from the place before, your first thought is, "this place sucks now." You don't stop to think about how the place has had to do more with less. These coaches and parents we all complain about do that same thing with us. Of course, knowing that makes it no less infuriating, and I always feel like they must think I'm just making excuses when I try to explain it to them.

And then I twist around the famous refrain we hear so often: "You'll only appreciate us after we go out of business."

 

Wait, you mean I'm not personally to blame for the page cuts in our section!?! Could you tell some of our readers that for me?