Complaining parents - When did this trend start?

[Tom Petty]

I got tired of wasting that page each week and moved it all to the Web. Newsprint is limited, cyberspace isn't.

Like somebody else said, it's amazing how many parents want it in the actual paper so they can cut it out for a scrapbook or the fridge door.

i think it's a great use of a page and a little stfu.

 

[wickedwritah]

jesus****ingchrist, only parents worse than soccer ... swimming.

... followed by gymnastics.

...then figure skating.

In my earlier, much more high strung days, I hated meeting with people coming into the office. (I was like hockeybeat witnessing Rockfeller Center tourists at Christmas.) I would do anything -- ANYTHING! -- not to deal with many members of the public. Well, there was this one guy from the local figure skating club who owned a bagel shop in town. He guilt-tripped me into meeting with him at his shop -- I did it because I thought I had to, since I was the good local weekly newspaper sports editor -- and he's showing me pictures of 9-year-olds. I'm kinda repulsed, since these outfits are a tad revealing. Once I had been there for a while, he would just walk into the office, pass by the receptionist and head to my desk in the back whenever he felt like it -- I'd have no warning.

Looking back on it, it's funny, but back then, the whole deal kinda frightened me.

 

[Cadet]

Before I got to my shop, the battle had already been fought over the remote controlled car club. Sports lost.

I had only been giving it cursory mention, so I got an in-office visit from the president one day. He brought with him a DVD so he could show me that "they were a real, competitive sport". Sorry, you're a bunch of guys playing with remote controlled cars. That's Radio Shack, not NASCAR.

He wanted me to pop it right in so we could watch it together, right then and there. Good thing my shop was so cheap we didn't have a DVD player...

 

[Inky_Wretch]

I got tired of wasting that page each week and moved it all to the Web. Newsprint is limited, cyberspace isn't.

Like somebody else said, it's amazing how many parents want it in the actual paper so they can cut it out for a scrapbook or the fridge door.

i think it's a great use of a page and a little stfu.

If you've got the room, great for you. But here it came down to scrapping one of our college football pages or doing rec sports photos. Given our location, we'd have lost a lot more readers by dropping the FBC page.

 

[writing irish]

Sounds like you should call it the "All the **** We Don't Care About" page.

we call it "here you go, assholes."

It'd be fun to design the masthead for that.

 

[Tom Petty]

I got tired of wasting that page each week and moved it all to the Web. Newsprint is limited, cyberspace isn't.

Like somebody else said, it's amazing how many parents want it in the actual paper so they can cut it out for a scrapbook or the fridge door.

i think it's a great use of a page and a little stfu.

If you've got the room, great for you. But here it came down to scrapping one of our college football pages or doing rec sports photos. Given our location, we'd have lost a lot more readers by dropping the FBC page.

agreed, but for me, a plate of stfu it too valuable.

 

[Tom Petty]

Sounds like you should call it the "All the **** We Don't Care About" page.

we call it "here you go, assholes."

It'd be fun to design the masthead for that.

i actually have, and yes, yes, i know, that's how **** like that gets into the paper.

 

[writing irish]

Hope there's never an error in your section, TP, but should the unthinkable happen, be sure to post a sample on the design thread. I'm thinking "Here you go," in a very sober, patrician, serifed font...followed by "ASSHOLES" in a large, festive, cartoonish font.

 

[doctor x]

You can't spell "scrapbook" without C-R-A-P.

 

[Tom Petty]

Hope there's never an error in your section, TP, but should the unthinkable happen, be sure to post a sample on the design thread. I'm thinking "Here you go," in a very sober, patrician, serifed font...followed by "ASSHOLES" in a large, festive, cartoonish font.

i'm thinkin' futura bold. :D

 

[Tom Petty]

You can't spell "scrapbook" without C-R-A-P.

thank you. i will use that at least a half-dozen times.

 

[BertoltBrecht]

Hi, I'm Helvetica. Use me for the "Here you go." Everyone else does.

 

[EStreetJoe]

The top two parent complaints (and the responses they got) that I can remember in the last 15 years:

- One time a Little League parent called to complain that the writeup on her son's game was three lines of agate type while another game for her son's league got four lines.
(I can't remember what the person who answered the phone told her, but it was one that had us all laughing for a while in the office)

- The time we had two high school girls basketball players going to hit 1,000 points on the same day. One girl in a tournament quarterfinal in the afternoon. One girl in a consolation game of the same tournament in the evening. Our plan was to staff the afternoon game and make the evening game the lead of the wrap, giving it some extra space. Only problem was that the girl in the afternoon was white and played at a suburban school, girl in the evening was an African-American playing for a suburban school in the evening. The parent of the girl in the evening game attended the afternoon game (at a different site) and saw we had a reporter and photographer there. Called to say we were racist if we didn't cover her daughter's game the same way. Assistant sports editor explained to her that we didn't have a reporter or available to cover the game but we were going to give it good play. Not good enough for her. She called the managing editor with her complaint. Managing editor made us get a reporter available and had the photography department make a photographer available and we had to run both stories on page 1 (thankfully we were allowed to run the consolation game photo inside).

However my favorite complaints...during high school season and during the summertime Little League District tournament season (the first step on the road to Williamsport which we cover the hell out of) -- "How come little Johnny's game wasn't in the paper" "It wasn't in the paper because your child's coach/manager didn't call the game in"
(Or during high school season, when I had a beat, I'd love the parents that would call in to complain our weekly stats were wrong and would try telling me where the error was. I'd respond to have the coach call and I'd go through everything game-by-game with the coach to find and correct the error. Nine times out of 10 the coach wouldn't call)

 

[oldhack]

When boomers became parents.

When boomers were kids.

I had a stringing job for the local paper where I went to the local junior baseball field every night, picked up the score sheets, talked to coaches, etc. In the 15 minutes it took me to drive home, sometimes I had a dozen calls to return, mainly from parents pleading with me to mention their kid's home run or complaining about the coach. That was in 1959.

Biggest problem: The printers union sponsored one of the teams, and its coach was a Linotype operator at the paper. So I could usually count on an added sentence or two appearing in my story, saying Joe Smith went three for four or Paul Jones won his fourth straight game.

 

[Tom Petty]

The top two parent complaints (and the responses they got) that I can remember in the last 15 years:

- One time a Little League parent called to complain that the writeup on her son's game was three lines of agate type while another game for her son's league got four lines.
(I can't remember what the person who answered the phone told her, but it was one that had us all laughing for a while in the office)

- The time we had two high school girls basketball players going to hit 1,000 points on the same day. One girl in a tournament quarterfinal in the afternoon. One girl in a consolation game of the same tournament in the evening. Our plan was to staff the afternoon game and make the evening game the lead of the wrap, giving it some extra space. Only problem was that the girl in the afternoon was white and played at a suburban school, girl in the evening was an African-American playing for a suburban school in the evening. The parent of the girl in the evening game attended the afternoon game (at a different site) and saw we had a reporter and photographer there. Called to say we were racist if we didn't cover her daughter's game the same way. Assistant sports editor explained to her that we didn't have a reporter or available to cover the game but we were going to give it good play. Not good enough for her. She called the managing editor with her complaint. Managing editor made us get a reporter available and had the photography department make a photographer available and we had to run both stories on page 1 (thankfully we were allowed to run the consolation game photo inside).

However my favorite complaints...during high school season and during the summertime Little League District tournament season (the first step on the road to Williamsport which we cover the hell out of) -- "How come little Johnny's game wasn't in the paper" "It wasn't in the paper because your child's coach/manager didn't call the game in"
(Or during high school season, when I had a beat, I'd love the parents that would call in to complain our weekly stats were wrong and would try telling me where the error was. I'd respond to have the coach call and I'd go through everything game-by-game with the coach to find and correct the error. Nine times out of 10 the coach wouldn't call)

i once had a high school fan (parent) call me complaining about inch count. seems as though the jackass thought he did his homework and would bust our balls using our "lingo" because he knew we simply loved one school and hated another.

so the dip**** broke out the ruler and measured every boys basketball story the two teams received for an entire season. proudly, the dip**** says something along the lines of: you gave team X this amount of inches and team Y this amount.

(i was shocked because the inch count actually was off by only 30-40 inches.)

i then asked the guy if he took column width into account while measuring inches. after explaining two or 12 times how column width would add or subtract from inch count, and after he actually grasped the concept, the guy hung up on me.

 

[John Newsom]

A tangent:

Do you get e-mails from parents who write about their own children in the third person?

We ran our HS volleyball preview today, and the only response we got was from a mom who suggested that we should have included (or featured - she wasn't all that clear) another player from another local school. Mom and the other player happen to have the same last name, but there's no acknowledgement from mom that the other player is also her daughter. (I assuming that they're related. Almost every time I get e-mails like this, there's a family connection.)

I understand that parents want their kids to get ink, and I'm fine with parents calling or e-mailing to tip us off to stories about their children. Some parents are actually pretty gracious, despite the horror stories above (and I've got my own), and some parents deliver workable story ideas about a local kid or team who did something remarkable.

But what's with the third-person approach? Like I'm not going to figure out the connection?

P.S. To piggy back on the inch-count story above, I once had to explain how to calculate percentage change to a high school principal. He had called in response to a project piece that ranked his high school last in the county.

 

[MilanWall]

I understand that parents want their kids to get ink, and I'm fine with parents calling or e-mailing to tip us off to stories about their children. Some parents are actually pretty gracious, despite the horror stories above (and I've got my own), and some parents deliver workable story ideas about a local kid or team who did something remarkable.

I agree. I got a story idea from a parent once that ended up winning me a first-place award at the state's PA awards that year (I didn't think the story was that great, but that's another matter). Other times I've had parents come up to me at games and compliment me to the point of where I'm getting embarrassed. Parents can simultaneously be one of the best things and worst things about this business.