USCHO on the Beanpot Final

USCHO's recap of the BU/NE final:

[www.uscho.com]

Did I miss something, or are there now five teams in the Beanpot? If not, how is it Northeastern was "[p]laying against four ranked teams"?!

Beeeej

USCHO is about enthusiasm for college hockey first, absolute accuracy and fluid prose second. Plus, the guy was writing on deadline (by definition). I don't think there's a long line of copy editors in green eyeshades this story passes through en route to a posting.

It's an order of magnitude better than a decade ago when your college hockey fix was the weekly column in the Boston Globe or NY Times.

I'm not asking for "absolute accuracy," Bill, I'm asking for fewer idiots.

Beeeej

Not to mention that Northeastern would never have actually played three teams (let alone four) at all in the Beanpot, given that it is a two-round tournament.

Easy, big fella. Not only do journalists enlighten and amuse us, but they serve a valuable public service, namely keeping politicians, lawyers, and car salesmen from being lonely at the very bottom of the "professions you trust" polls.

Plus, if Jason Moy is really typing that 2,000 word bracketology column from scratch each week, rather than cutting and pasting the 1,500-world boilerplate preface before letting loose with the week's changes and musings, the kinetic energy from his fingers moving up and down across the keyboard might heat a village the size of Ogdensburg.

And as you know, every village has its idiot. Many of them choose publishing which keeps them out of, say, teaching, where they could do real damage.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

the 1,500-world boilerplate preface [/q]

That must be some boilerplate.

2000 words isn't too hard to pull off, if you know what you're talking about. In a double-spaced Word document, that's at most 8 pages. That's one night of work, easily accomplished while working a normal ~40 hour/week job. Obviously, it's even easier if most of it is copied and pasted.

I was making fun of the column's pyramid - not inverted pyramid - style. (Inverted pyramid meaning the important stuff in the first graf, eg "A crazed gunman wearing a black and red jersey shot and wounded four Boston Terrier mascot dogs outside Agganis Arena Monday night" and the last paragraph describing Boston laws on cruelty to animals.) As you have seen in Bracketology, you have to wade through the seeding rules each and every week until you get to the writer's thoughts on who might be paired where against whom. That boilerplate should all be on the bottom or better off on the side.

In newspapers, they keep around former useful newsmen, now drunks and divorced, as copy editors, and even in their stupors they recognize egregious errors of writing and fix it. That alas does not exist in the world on online journalism where the staffing is lean.

Do you mean to suggest, Bill, that USCHO doesn't have people who edit the game reports and columns before they go online? Because I seriously doubt that's remotely true. They may even be drunk and/or divorced.

Beeeej

Jeez - settle down Beeej ... yes, our editors are actually drunk and divorced ... but christ, I can look through every day's Washington Post and find 30 little errors. It happens. Do you actually think the people writing and editing believe there are 4 other ranked teams - or that it was a typo that was glossed over under pressure? This makes the writer and/or editor an idiot? Do you have any idea how much editing is done each week -- often editing work from student writers with varying degree of skill -- by one or two people? Last night, one editor had to deal with 6 lengthy stories and update the front page. Manpower is an issue - but the ability to the job, and desire to be accurate is not.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

USCHO is about enthusiasm for college hockey first, absolute accuracy and fluid prose second.[/q]

I realize you weren't really criticizing - but that, I can attest, is false.

[Q]adamw Wrote:
Last night, one editor had to deal with 6 lengthy stories and update the front page. Manpower is an issue - but the ability to the job, and desire to be accurate is not.[/q]Clearly, the solution is to not carry an unnecessarily large number of articles about the Beanpot.

How much editing a deadline-driven story gets before going online, that would be a question perhaps put to someone from USCHO, and even there you may get a politic rather than frank air-the-linens-in-public answer. (You want someone to say, "We try, but we're thinly staffed and thinly funded, and stuff happens"?)

Regardless, deadline pressures affect everyone, not just USCHO.com, and my general experience with online vs. print stories I write is that the editing / factchecking / verification process for a deadline-driven online story is less. Also, it's less in newer organizations that don't have as much staffing. That also holds for print pubs that are new vs. established publications. You'll see an occasional typo in Business Week or Fortune and you're aghast because you almost never see it. New Yorker is the gold standard for fact-checking; if the author mentions red-flocked wallpaper in the bar of a restaurant in Venice, a fact-checker contacts the restaurant to confirm. (Note that fact-checking is not the same as opinion-checking, because you can't do that. The facts could be all right and the opinion could be wrong, if opinions can be wrong.)

Online has the advantage of your being able to correct an error if you choose to. Running a Corrections & Clarifications note two weeks later isn't the same. No reason USCHO couldn't change Northeastern being in a tournament with "four" ranked teams to facing "three" in the Beanpot. As you saw, The Sun changed online "fascist" to "fastest" or whatever word it was the author meant but didn't type out.

You've seen how the online community can shape events, ranging from getting corrections made to affecting lives and careers. Bloggers helped blow away a CNN executive, Eason Jordan, for comments he made in Davos at the economic summitt (claiming that American troops deliberately fired at journalists). The online community keeps writers and editors on their toes.

Bill - you have a wonderful tendency to write a lot without saying anything Is there anything you just said that anyone would disagree with?

There's a difference between fact-checking and opinion-checking ... there's also a difference between stupid and typos.

[q]The facts could be all right and the opinion could be wrong, if opinions can be wrong.[/q]Of course, opinions can be wrong. You're opinions are wrong all the time. Wait, that's just my opinion! And it's probably wrong too! (jk, btw)

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

And as you know, every village has its idiot. [/q]

So what village are you missing from?

(sorry, so easy that I couldn't resist...)

And when it's a village of one, the idiot is easier to find. TBRW isn't even a village. I'm a Rotten Borough Idiot.

And as such, I'm amazed at how many little and big errors I make, having no deadlines and having been a professional editor for... ahem... longer than at least one member of the team has been alive. The troubles may lie in my sobriety and/or marital status.

Error happens. The rule should be: don't nitpick unless it's an incredibly cruel, ad hominum, libelous bloodletting that results in a suicide. Cuz then it's funny.

Thanks for the demi-compliment. Yes, when I want to I can take up space or airtime and sound superficially authoritative. <g> I was really good at that on the cable news shows during the Internet boom. Alas, I had and have a great face for radio, as the saying goes.

This is a forum where we can have fun and perhaps exchange thoughts and suggestions, along with mostly good-natured ribbing. It’s good to underscore that things like Northeastern being in the Beanpot with four not three ranked opponents was just a slip by author, just as the Sun recently used “fascist” instead of (I forget what) other word. No conspiracy against readers, just pressures of deadlines. Not every author has the ability to turn out 1,000 words of poetic prose on deadline, on par with a Peter Gammons or Bob Ryan. If I wrote it again, “USCHO is about enthusiasm for college hockey first, absolute accuracy and fluid prose second” would be cast differently because it’s not that anyone forces accuracy down on the list of key attributes, it’s just a factor of deadline writing. Like I posted before, I’ve made bigger mistakes than that: I once let one my writers’ stories go into print saying that Ferdinand and Isabella were the current monarchs of Spain. It was a simple misunderstanding when she yelled the question across the newsroom - “Ferdinand-Isabella, king and queen of Spain, right?” - I thought she meant historical figures, she meant current rulers. The readers loved it.

Okay, it’s true that picking on WHRB’s announcers and their love affair with Dov Grumet-Morris was for something that most any college radio station does: Root for the home team and the star player and go overboard. (BTW their between-periods interviews were pretty good if you like wacky questions about helmet hair.)

There are also suggestions and observations made here that are more serious:
-- Concern that Cornell’s hockey press guide wasn’t out until mid-season and after the basketball press guide. And when it did arrive online, you had to stitch together seven PDFs to get a complete guide. (Some others took umbrage, saying the sports information people and student assistants are working really hard with a small staff.)
-- [OT] Last spring we talked about how ESPN2 screwed up the lacrosse finals TV coverage by using an overly large, overly self-important graphic in the upper left corner that was great for say baseball (batter’s in the middle of the screen) but terrible for a sport like lacrosse where it obscured the goaltender for teams attacking right-to-left.
-- With the weekly Bracketology story on uscho.com, it’s my opinion that some fundamental rules of writing and editing and reader-appeal aren’t used, namely putting the new material up top. With USCHO’s new (well, not that new) formatting resulting in narrower columns on most PCs, you had to scroll down about 104 lines (this past week) until there’s new information. That could go to the bottom, it could be a sidebar, it could be a clickable link; it just shouldn’t be the lead (and middle of) the story.

USCHO and to a lesser extent say INCH are wonderful resources for hockey fans, because college hockey isn’t a sport that gets a lot of coverage in daily papers, let alone Sports Illustrated. I wish there was a springtime version of USCHO for lacrosse, where no current site really stands out. For the people who run sites, the most worrisome feedback should be none at all.

Maybe we should start an “[OT] USCHO Wishlist” to show how much we care.

Adam's right, of course, I was a little harsh, and unduly so - my bad. Perhaps instead of saying I'd like "fewer idiots," it would be better to say I'd like "less idiocy."

Everybody's capable of making errors - case in point my Colorado College Rule anachronism in another thread. But then I'm also not a commercial enterprise purporting to be an authority on the subject.

Typos, I easily understand - careless stuff like "facing four ranked opponents" or "attended Cornell on an athletic scholarship" or "the legendary gold-medal game in which the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in 1980" just cranks me right the hell up.

Beeeej

[Q]Beeeej Wrote:Typos, I easily understand - careless stuff like "facing four ranked opponents" or "attended Cornell on an athletic scholarship" or "the legendary gold-medal game in which the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in 1980" just cranks me right the hell up.[/q]

disagree ... the latter two are clear cases of lack of knowledge. The first one is clearly a brain fart in a hurry. Obviously you can't face four other teams in a four-team tournament. If you asked the person writing that to think about it a second, they'd get it. You ask the person writing the other two lines to think about it a second, they wouldn't get it - because they had no idea they were wrong.

[Q]adamw Wrote:

Beeeej Wrote:Typos, I easily understand - careless stuff like "facing four ranked opponents" or "attended Cornell on an athletic scholarship" or "the legendary gold-medal game in which the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in 1980" just cranks me right the hell up.[/Q]
disagree ... the latter two are clear cases of lack of knowledge. The first one is clearly a brain fart in a hurry. Obviously you can't face four other teams in a four-team tournament. If you asked the person writing that to think about it a second, they'd get it. You ask the person writing the other two lines to think about it a second, they wouldn't get it - because they had no idea they were wrong.[/q]

You can distinguish them however you want, they're still all in the category of "careless" if they got past both the writer and the editor - and they're still all in the category of things that crank me right the hell up and make me want to scream.

Beeeej

 

___________________________
Beeeej, Esq.

"Cornell isn't an organization. It's a loose affiliation of independent fiefdoms united by a common hockey team."
- Steve Worona