Italian_Stallion
Active Member
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2007
- Messages
- 2,049
There's been lots of talk about online newspaper comments. Today, I met with huge disappointment when I looked at a just-published feature story on a skydiving competition to find that the damned person who coordinated it posted a long rant.
It didn't ruin the story. I think it's a great story, but I sure can't send anyone to the link if I want to use it as a clip, and the editors are going to get the wrong impression. What sucks is that I did nothing wrong. The person is mad that I didn't cover the extreme skydiving event as a sport and that the story makes skydivers out to be "crazy people."
The only time crazy was used was when one of the participants said people think she's crazy.
The story was a local section feature. I was asked to write about the people and their uniqueness. So I wrote a story about the common bond of skydiving and how it brings together diverse people, all of whom love the excitement of the sport.
The result of the competition was supposed to be summarized in a single graph. It wasn't a sports story at all. Yet the guy complains that the paper's sports section covers cage fighting, which he says isn't a sport, but doesn't cover skydiving as a sport.
After launching all these missiles at my story, the commenter proceeds to copy his poorly written press release with its all-caps designation for words he thinks are especially important and quotation marks around the name of the event and just about anything else he thinks doesn't quite deserve full capitalization.
I'm just pissed. We were the only one of four different newspapers and five different TV stations to cover the damned event, and the guy is completely ungrateful.
I know the short answer is that the guy's a **** and I should just blow it off. But don't you get tired of dip****s anonymously trashing your work? If I were a national columnist, I could take the heat. But I'm trying to impress editors and climb the ladder. Instead, some jackass is knocking me off the ladder.
The bigger picture, I guess, is that editors no longer get phone calls. Instead, people just toss a complaint on a Web site, where everyone else can read it. In the past, papers would sort out the complaints and then only post corrections, etc., when one was warranted. Now commenters can say just about anything. And the sad part is that people tend to pile on because they have this sense that the media is about the same as the government, an all-evil empire trying to alter their world to the detriment of living things.
Had the person sent the message directly to me or to an editor, there would be a conversation. Instead, it's just this nameless post at the end of a story. I don't know what the ethics folks say. Can I e-mail the guy? Should I e-mail the guy? Should I send the editor a note explaining things?
It didn't ruin the story. I think it's a great story, but I sure can't send anyone to the link if I want to use it as a clip, and the editors are going to get the wrong impression. What sucks is that I did nothing wrong. The person is mad that I didn't cover the extreme skydiving event as a sport and that the story makes skydivers out to be "crazy people."
The only time crazy was used was when one of the participants said people think she's crazy.
The story was a local section feature. I was asked to write about the people and their uniqueness. So I wrote a story about the common bond of skydiving and how it brings together diverse people, all of whom love the excitement of the sport.
The result of the competition was supposed to be summarized in a single graph. It wasn't a sports story at all. Yet the guy complains that the paper's sports section covers cage fighting, which he says isn't a sport, but doesn't cover skydiving as a sport.
After launching all these missiles at my story, the commenter proceeds to copy his poorly written press release with its all-caps designation for words he thinks are especially important and quotation marks around the name of the event and just about anything else he thinks doesn't quite deserve full capitalization.
I'm just pissed. We were the only one of four different newspapers and five different TV stations to cover the damned event, and the guy is completely ungrateful.
I know the short answer is that the guy's a **** and I should just blow it off. But don't you get tired of dip****s anonymously trashing your work? If I were a national columnist, I could take the heat. But I'm trying to impress editors and climb the ladder. Instead, some jackass is knocking me off the ladder.
The bigger picture, I guess, is that editors no longer get phone calls. Instead, people just toss a complaint on a Web site, where everyone else can read it. In the past, papers would sort out the complaints and then only post corrections, etc., when one was warranted. Now commenters can say just about anything. And the sad part is that people tend to pile on because they have this sense that the media is about the same as the government, an all-evil empire trying to alter their world to the detriment of living things.
Had the person sent the message directly to me or to an editor, there would be a conversation. Instead, it's just this nameless post at the end of a story. I don't know what the ethics folks say. Can I e-mail the guy? Should I e-mail the guy? Should I send the editor a note explaining things?
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