Pegoraro Article

As a former sports editor of the Sun who covered the men's hockey team for two years, I've been following this post with interest. The Sun prides itself on being one of the top college papers in the country and should be held to high standards. I must admit that I've been disappointed in the overall quality of the Sun sports section over the past several years. In the Pegoraro article, for example, there are no comments from Pegoraro. That's just lazy journalism. Hopefully, the Sun sports staff will get its act together in the near future.

[Q]Give 'em a break, guys. It's not like they're being paid. And it is a student paper.[/Q]

I understand this and that's why I'm not going after some newbie reporter covering polo. Owen is the Sports Editor and it is his job to set an example for the rest of the sports reporters.

And it's not your high school rag. Jeremy Schaap, Kurt Vonnegut, SC Johnson, etc all worked for the paper and helped make it one of the best collegiate newspapers in the country.

Maybe I have less to bitch about now that it is free?

Actually editors do get paid for their time at the paper. Albeit J Schaap made around $10,000 and the current sports editors make around $500 due to a decrease in national advertising, but they still get paid for their time.

Suggesting that the sports editors are paid for their time, while technically true, is completely misleading. They make $500 a year while working roughly 30 hours a week. Over the course of a year, it probably averages out to less than a dollar per hour of work. On top of that, they don't see any of that money until at least a couple months after the school year ends. Even if you were to add in things like "they don't have to pay for hockey tickets," they don't get all the benefits of having tickets such as the fun of cheering for the Red. I only took Econ 101, but I think you could probably make an argument that technically, being an editor at The Sun is, at least monetarily, a losing proposition, since the time invested could theoretically be spent earning more money elsewhere.

Since I'm posting to this thread anyway, I might as well voice my opinion on the constant Sun-ripping posts on eLF. I am a former Assistant Sports Editor, so naturally, I take all of this a little personally. I'm not here to defend the writers or editors or excuse them, because while I was there, we all made our share of mistakes, and believe me, it's embarassing and we did care about the product we turned out. However, it is a college paper. Very few of the staffers have prior writing experience, save for perhaps a high school paper. Yet here on the forum, everyone seems to take every possible opportunity to blast the quality of The Sun, while seemingly failing to recognize anything positive about The Sun's coverage. I would guess that The Sun provides more coverage of Cornell hockey than any other single news source, and does it while covering all of the other varsity sports at Cornell. The Sun puts out an eight-page (is it 12? I forget) wrap every year dedicated strictly to the hockey team's season preview. I haven't been back to Ithaca in about a year, so I don't know if this is still happening this season, but my senior year, the Friday before every home weekend, there was a four-page wrap previewing the weekend's games. Yes, while The Sun is not the New York Times, it is churning out plenty of Cornell hockey info. The INCH article on ESPN.com referred to in another thread today is nice; we all can say, "Cool, Cornell's on ESPN.com," but does that article tell you anything new about the team that you couldn't have read in The Sun at some point already this season? I would say it doesn't. I remember a couple of years ago when I was the ASE, and every now and then the anti-Sun post would pop up here, and it would piss me off, and the most ironic part of it all was when the Red went to NCAA regionals in Providence, and surprise, everyone from out of town asked people to bring copies of The Sun to the game so they could see what the preview had to say.

Bottom line: The Sun editors and writers, past and present, all want to see the quality of the paper improve. But in my view, everyone here seems to have it out for The Sun just because it's a ready target. The post which with this thread began started, "Nice article in The Sun today...," and then not a single person agreed. In fact, one poster pointed out that there were no quotes from Pegoraro. The article in question was a column, an opinion piece, which usually doesn't have quotes at all. But the only opinion pieces that get mentioned in this thread are about video games. ESPN.com is constantly referencing video games, but nobody seems to notice that. Take a step back, people. If you're going to call out the shortcomings of The Sun's sports section, at least realize its value as well.

OK, deep breath. As you were.

At ease, Alex. Your angst comes from a fallacy common to people close to a subject - that anybody offering criticism must, in the same breath, acknowledge all the positive aspects of what they criticize, or else their criticism is 1) personal, and/or 2) without credibility. I notice that you have not come to the quick and eloquent defense of the Cornell Ticket Office, even though we've spent a few paragraphs criticizing them without also singing their praises for the 90% of things they've done right this year.

I'll acknowledge right now that the Sun's mere existence is a startling accomplishment, given that it is produced on a daily basis by full-time students who are not being paid (or are being paid an absurd pittance) to do it. I would say the same thing of WVBR, where I spent many long hours - but my pride in the quality of that radio station in the early 1990s does not require me to ignore the fact that some DJs were sloppy or that some sports- and newscasters were ill-informed. Nor does it require me to defend the station vigorously whenever somebody notes that a DJ let a CD skip for nearly a minute, but doesn't follow the criticism by conceding how splendidly diverse the playlist is.

Some of the Sun's writers occasionally write badly. Much of the bad writing gets past the editors, whose primary responsibility I have always assumed to be editing. Your fine achievements and those of other Sunnies notwithstanding, the quality of the newspaper leaves something to be desired. What is wrong with the Sun is always a fair subject of conversation, whether or not we qualify it with our unconditional love of what is right with the Sun.

Think of it this way: The fact that we're able to criticize the Sun means at least we're reading it.

Beeeej

Regarding cornelldavy's post defending the Sun:

OK everyone, let's pile on!

What you're essentially saying is that something is better than nothing, which is true in this case, but that doesn't mean the something is acceptable. The Sun sports section can be, and in the past was, much better than it's been recently. With the success of the hockey program, attention is focused that much more on articles about the team, so the editors and reporters should know they need to make an extra effort.

Anyone who wrote and edited that section should be able to tell when the reporter or editor takes the lazy route. I thought today's feature on Topher Scott was excellent. But too many other articles are written or edited sloppily, or show no insight or no effort. Pregame stories on the hockey team generally read like releases from Sports Information. Interviews with opposing coaches and players are rare. On the website, at least, there doesn't appear to be any wrapup coverage from the week in the ECAC, beyond a recital of where Cornell is ranked in the national polls.

I've met Owen, and he seems like a nice guy, but his rah-rah Cornell hoops column made me embarassed to be a former Sun editor. The same problems appear on the op-ed pages -- it's like there's no gatekeeper over what gets published.

And Janiga's column this week? Any decent editor would have said that it should be presented as a mid-week soft story, not a column. Columns used to be about analyzing the hard stories, not looking for an excuse to mention your ex-editor's name in print.

As I said, the point wasn't to make excuses or defend the quality of The Sun. Everyone associated with the paper wants it to be better than it is. The point was just to show (and yes, perhaps to vent some frustration about) that The Sun's sports section only gets noticed here when something isn't right. True, maybe I do take it a little too personally. Maybe I should just be satisfied with the majority of the time when there are no comments at all. Was it Bill Klem who said something like, "As an umpire, the greatest applause you can hear is silence?"

Actually, no, the Cornell Sun is not a student newspaper, and neither are the Crimson, Yalie Daily, etcetera. The preferred term is student-run newspaper. They are independent daily newspapers that happen to be run by students and there is a huge difference, one of which is that (you may not agree on an article by article basis) it teaches responsibility. You get hit with a libel suit, the paper pays, not the U. You lose money, you lose money; you don't go the Student Activities Fund for more funds. And if Dean Wormer doesn't like what's written about goings-on at Faber College, he can shut the paper down. Can't happen here.

BTW, the Sun produces a fair number of Pulitzer Prize winners, not as many as Cornell produces All-America hockey players, but way more than Cornell has made final four appearances in hockey, lacrosse, and soccer. Plus your usual rash of doctors and lawyers.

Oh, not everyone works for free. If there is a profit, and there most years, some of it gets voted into shares for the editor in chief, sports editor, etcetera. A top editor in some years would make enough to pay for his or her books, car insurance, and maybe for the first couple months' tuition. On a dollars per hour basis, you're better off busing dishes at the Straight. Maybe it's better now, but you don't do it for the money.

It's nice to see people getting so passionate about the Sun! The only reason people like myself make constructive criticism is because we want to see it be as good as it can. Unfortunately, the sports section has often sunk to mediocrity in recent years. As for the Pegoraro article which started this whole thread, when you read the paper online, as I do, you can't always tell easily what's a column and what's a feature or news article. The fact that by reading the Pegoraro article I wasn't able to tell it was a column is an indicator that it wasn't well-done as a column. And even if it was a column, I don't feel it's right to take a cheap shot at Pegoraro by referring to him as "fat" without giving him a chance to respond.
Finally, no one wrote Cornell hockey stories as well as Bill Howard! Bill graduated before I got to Cornell, but when I was on the Sun staff, he covered many of the Boston-area games for us and I loved reading his stories!

Thank you for the kind words. Actually Paul Kaye who preceded me was a far better writer but he went on to med school, putting behind him the idea of making a living via typewriter.

I think also the quality of the writer rises up to meet the quality of the team. When Cornell hockey and lax were on top of the world back when, it generated enthusiasm and competition to cover the team.

A downside to writing for the Sun was that then - maybe now - many of the sports and overall editors are from downstate and believe sports rises and falls with the New York Knickerbockers and New York Yankees. They would was philosophic for column inches n end about the Yankees and spring training. Sheesh, it was enough make a self respecting Orioles and Giants or Sox (or White Sox) fan want to barf.

Your thought about the Scott article being excellent was seconded by College Sports TV

[www.collegesports.com]

Does Kyle get paid when CSTV picks up the article? He should!

[Q]billhoward Wrote:a self respecting Orioles...fan[/q]

Such a thing exists?

Yes, you typically get paid when another outlet picks up your article. But don't for a moment think it's a living wage. the only thing positive about your writing getting picked up is that it's more lucratrive than your photos getting picked up.

There's a long and glorious history for the Orioles. The Bobby Grich etcetera champsionship years of the 1970s ... [then a brief period of darkness] ... and now there's the beautiful ball park.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

Yes, you typically get paid when another outlet picks up your article. But don't for a moment think it's a living wage. the only thing positive about your writing getting picked up is that it's more lucratrive than your photos getting picked up. [/q]

Whenever one of my articles was picked up, I never saw a check...maybe it went right to The Sun, or maybe it was included in my share at the end of the year, but I always assumed the various outlets were picking up the story off of U-Wire because they subscribed to that wire service. Perhaps U-Wire then turns around and gives money to The Sun whenever an article is used, but if that's the case, at least these days, I don't think it goes to the writer, at least not directly.

Well, that's good preparation for adult life, where you'd do something special for AP or UPI -- not just that they'd pick up a story you'd already written -- and your newspaper would pocket the check.

At the Sun, it's hard to talk about things like residuals and one-time use rights. That's more like when you negotiate with the New Yorker. But there's a difference between say another member of the college newspaper network picking up a story, and a third party, theoretically for-profit, entity picking up the work. The deal with UPI, when it existed, was sort of a socialist one for all and all for one -- a paper shared it work with other papers so the other papers could share their work with your paper.

Between freelancing and working summers for a newspaper, I was able to make the majority of my tuition money. But that was a long, long time ago and I think as you know tuition has far outpaced inflation the last 5, 10, 15, 25, and 35 years. When I was president of the Cornell Club of Western Mass. a couple years back, we used to get pep-talk notes from Day Hall saying that once again, the cost of a Cornell education had not risen more than tuition. Then those annual notes stopped coming. Don't suspect any Cornell Club officers are getting them recently.

And, geez, what's tuition like if you're paying in Canadian dollars? It's a wonder anyone comes across the border to play for Cornell. or Colgate, etcetera.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

And, geez, what's tuition like if you're paying in Canadian dollars? It's a wonder anyone comes across the border to play for Cornell. or Colgate, etcetera. [/q]

[www.elynah.com]

[Q]jeh25 Wrote:

billhoward Wrote:

And, geez, what's tuition like if you're paying in Canadian dollars? It's a wonder anyone comes across the border to play for Cornell. or Colgate, etcetera. [/Q]
[/q]

Actually, an average American family makes about the same in US dollars. I believe the average (mean? median?) income is around $45K. Of course, if you make $90K US, it's still a hassle to pay for Cornell.

>>> [link from above] When you consider the US-Canadian exchange rate in conjunction with the median Canadian income, it is easy to see that even solidly middle class Canadians would still qualify for rather generous need based financial aid. In 2000, the median Canadian income of a 2 parent household with children was $77000 CAN. With an exchange rate of .6362, that works out to about $48k a year. Thus, a well off Canadian that comes to the US to play hockey may get a sizable reduction in tuition, which to a Canadian appears to be a scholarship, but in fact is just need based aid.