USCHO on the Beanpot Final

[Trotsky]

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.

[billhoward]

Thanks for the demi-compliment. Yes, when I want to I can take up space or airtime and sound superficially authoritative. 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.

[Beeeej]

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

[adamw]

[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.

[Beeeej]

[Q]adamw Wrote:
 [Q2]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

[billhoward]

Beez, Northeastern playing four other ranked teams in a four team tournament was a no-harm, no-foul typo. Yeah, the author shouldn't have made the slip and the editor should have caught the slip. But we got the meaning. Newspapers and online truly are the first drafts of history.

The fanfare did have one effect: USCHO has corrected the lede.

[adamw]

[Q]Beeeej Wrote:
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[/q]

First thing I'd recommend then is a sedative.  Second, please don't become a newspaper publisher.

:-)

[KeithK]

[q]Second, please don't become a newspaper publisher.[/q]Since he's becoming a lawyer I guess we can be glad you can't sue for typos and brain farts.  :-D

[nyc94]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
Since he's becoming a lawyer I guess we can be glad you can't sue for typos and brain farts.[/q]


Didn't you see the SNL spoof of lawyer commercials?  Myth #8: In order to be successful, a lawsuit must have merit. False.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/92/92cgreen1.phtml