Dealing with reporters turned bloggers

JayFarrar · May 27, 2008

Here's the deal, where I work, one of the reporters quit to work for an internet startup.
So I was assigned to some of his old duties and I made some changes to how things went.
Since he's still hanging around, I run into him on occasion.
And tonight was one of those nights.
At first it was just pleasant then he started questioning me on the things that had changed because, you know he had set the standard for doing things right and I told him that they needed to be changed.
Then he started bitching about access and how he wasn't getting what he had gotten before.
I was like, what do you expect? You went to work for an online-only startup and you're a one-man show.
You are lucky to be getting in the door.
Then he started in on my paper's ownership and I had enough. I didn't explode with a STFU but I just told him I wasn't interested and that I needed to get some work done.
That quieted things down a little bit.
So I figured I would ask the SportsJournalists.com nation if they had run into anything similar and what you had done or what you would have done.

Sam Mills 51 · May 27, 2008

Ignore him. He's entitled to his opinion, but that doesn't mean you have to listen to it.

Treat him as you would a reader a reporter always runs into that has an axe to grind.

Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!! · May 28, 2008

buckweaver said:
Sam Mills 51 said:

Treat him as you would a reader a reporter always runs into that has an axe to grind.

Click to expand...

Or, you know, an ex-reporter who has an axe to grind. Used to be a guy who worked at my hometown paper about 15 years ago; not very well. He left to start his own business, it tanked, and now he's working for the local radio station covering the same prep games he did for the paper ... still not very well. He likes to remind us all how good he was at the paper ... but there's a reason he hasn't been hired back.

Don't you love those guys?
I think every shop has at least one.

BigTUNA · May 28, 2008

What's worse is the local radio guy that never worked for the paper that still thinks he's a better writer than you. One place where I worked, we had that, and I felt sorry for the guy so I let him string. We found out in baseball season that he sucked covering baseball, so I quit using him. He then came into the office one day while I was on assignment and blasted my ASE because he wanted a game. When he didn't get one, he went out and started his own web site and bad mouthing the paper to everyone that would listen. Unfortunately, that's a lot of people in that county. While no one really took him seriously, they would take him a little seriously when he started talking about how much better the paper would be if he were hired. No one knew to tell him if that were true he would have been hired at some point in the 1970s.