[OT] Martinez

[Beeeej]

By the way, what's with Martinez on USCHO?  I don't think I've ever seen one of the six (or five, or four) conferences' weekend preview columns be consistently so much later than the others over the course of an entire season.  Everybody else is up there Thursday night, but for the ECAC I have to check a few times during the day on Friday.  Ridiculous!

Beeeej

[billhoward]

[Q]Beeeej Wrote: By the way, what's with Martinez on USCHO?  I don't think I've ever seen one of the six (or five, or four) conferences' weekend preview columns be consistently so much later than the others over the course of an entire season.  Everybody else is up there Thursday night, but for the ECAC I have to check a few times during the day on Friday.  Ridiculous!

Beeeej[/q]
Maybe: Writing is an art and sometimes can't be rushed?

(Was I the only one who saw the subject line (especially fronted with the off-topic indicator) and thought this was about Pedro's status in New York?)

[Jordan 04]

[Q]

(Was I the only one who saw the subject line (especially fronted with the off-topic indicator) and thought this was about Pedro's status in New York?)[/q]

Nope.

31 days until Opening Day....38 until my 7th consecutive home opener.

:-D

[Josh '99]

I don't think that's actually off topic.  :-P

Jordan - got any extra tickets?

[The Rancor]

also he has a slight anti cornell bias.:-(

[Gabe Heafitz 98 04]

Jordan, going to seven consecutive Mets home openers is nothing to be proud of.

[Drew]

[Q]The Rancor Wrote:

 also he has a slight anti cornell bias. [/q]


He actually went to Clarkson and is tougher on Clarkson than anyone else.

[mjh89]

mets suck

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
Maybe: Writing is an art and sometimes can't be rushed?

(Was I the only one who saw the subject line (especially fronted with the off-topic indicator) and thought this was about Pedro's status in New York?)[/q]
What Martinez does it not an art.

Do I really need to bring up "If anyone told you that Yale would score 4 goals in the 3rd period, they would have been lying... anyone, that is, except someone on the Yale bench" again??

[Killer]

Although, with Pedro and Beltran on the roster, David Letterman may have to scrap his usual joke:

"It's Opening Day, and you know what that means: the Mets have been eliminated from the pennant race."

He should probably wait a week or so.

[Beeeej]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
Maybe: Writing is an art and sometimes can't be rushed?
[/q]

Journalists agree to meet deadlines when they take assignments.  The idea that art never has deadlines is a modern concept; most artists in previous eras were working for sponsors who very much imposed deadlines on their charges.

Beeeej

[billhoward]

Beeeej, to perhaps clarify your thought: Journalists promise they'll meet deadlines. On dailies and now online, sometimes the scribe turns over hastily written material to meet the deadline. On non-weekly magazines, the editor often builds in a cushion knowing the deadline won't always get met. When I turn over mss. on deadline, sometimes I don't hear back from an assigning editor for a week to ten days, and that was probably the fudge factor period he or she built in. When I'm the one assigning stories, I have a variable deadline based on reliability of the writer. With some writers, it's like term papers all over again: You start just far enough in advance that you'll just about finish on time, give or take a day or two.

Lastly, unless you have a smooth pipeline - say as good as a Toyota assembly line - the story can arrive late late in the readers' hands because of editing backlog, or posting problems. It's not always the writer's fault, although that's a good place to start.

But seriously: Readers come to expect such-and-such feature at a regular time, such as the hockey polls Monday afternoon. It may be 3 pm or 4 pm but you don't expect to see it at 11 am or next Tuesday morning.

[Beeeej]

All of which explains Martinez's column being consistently later than the others how?  If the editor builds in a cushion, Martinez has been even later than I thought.

Beeeej

P.S. I've been a journalist and an editor.  But thanks for the Deadlines 101 schtick, I'm sure you enjoyed it.

[DeltaOne81]

bill,

Despite all your yabbering, it does nothing to explain why martinez would consistently, reguarly, be a few to 12 hours later than everyone else. What you said applies to everyone, but this is just Martinez.

[billhoward]

[Q]Beeeej Wrote: By the way, what's with Martinez on USCHO?  I don't think I've ever seen one of the six (or five, or four) conferences' weekend preview columns be consistently so much later than the others over the course of an entire season.  Everybody else is up there Thursday night, but for the ECAC I have to check a few times during the day on Friday.  Ridiculous! - Beeeej[/q]This could be a long discussion as to why a writer misses or is allowed to miss deadlines.

Short answer and this is crude:
Q: Why does a dog lick himself?
A: Because he can.

Longer answer and this is just long:

(Preface: USCHO on its worst day beats one column a week in the New York Times and somebody occasionally mailing you a clip from the Globe or Mpls Star-Tribune. And there's more genuine love of the sport than any other commercial hockey site.)

Online is vibrant and timely. That is good. Different priorities come in to play. You may see less fit and finish, less polished writing, less concern for absolute deadline because the readers (many readers, most readers) don't know or don't care. Obviously not everyone doesn't care or this wouldn't have come up. (Compare USCHO to INCH, which has more polish and IMO less depth. INCH's bracket /playoffs prediction chart takes about 90 seconds to browse but has not much there. Bracketology on USCHO is painful to read and breaks every journalism rule in the book, but there's a pony in there somewhere, if you read all the way to the bottom. (Aside to Jason: It ain't right to write, "Additionally, the NCAA recently [sic] clarified its selection criteria to include a bonus factor for 'good' nonconference wins ..." when that "recently" paragraph has been a staple of the column since early 2004.))

Why the variable quality? In most of the online world, the money sucks and you get what you pay for. You have kids (figuratively) who can or have to live on peanuts. (Not everyone who started web sites in the 1990s got rich off them and did what they're supposed to do, which is sell out to someone richer and dumber than them, which then allows the former entrepreneurs to buy a pro sports team. And that was always stock options rich not salary rich, and that was the nineties, man.) Of course, half the newspapers in the world, the pay sucks, so you have kids, too. This also applies to up and coming TV like CSTV - I don't think the anchors are awash in money, but they at least are enthusiastic and / or have long blonde hair they flip around a lot. And for game coverage, you can always turn down the volume and just watch.

Everywhere, there is less emphasis on good writing as a life skill and maybe less emphasis about being on time. Everywhere. You see the well-researched piece on lax Hillel Hoffman posted here, that was good to very good writing, and everyone thought it was sensational. (Perhaps it's a corollary to DP Moynihan's theory of defining deviancy downward.) Or JP Morosi's stuff in the Albany paper - proof that a good liberal arts education (at which Harvard is pretty good) is more important that a J-school degree. Morosi's stuff is good, also, on an absolute scale but it reads like Pulitzer material because ain't nobody else outside of SI and the Globe and probably some guy at the Minneapolish paper that gives a rap about quality hockey writing (and who delivers the goods).

Unlike newspapers and magazines with years and years of publishing history, in online there are no washed up retreads like me to take a couple promising writers and really work with them to pass along the crafts they didn't learn on the Daily Sun or Crimson or Michigan Daily, and to help the other retards at least write passably well. (BTW, much as others beat up on the Sun, it's a hell of a training ground for writers and editors, and it doesn't cost Cornell one penny.) This writing tutelage is never done for the guy who's the hunting and fishing writer at the newspaper because a) it's hopeless and b) the editor claims the hunting/fishing writer's readers love unpolished prose.

Those grownups if they're in power can also have a come to Jesus meeting with wayward writers and say, turn in copy on time, or find something elseto do, like PR, or worst of all (it perpetuates the breed), teach journalism.

One last possibility: Some sites want to post material continuously, not just a big push Monday afternoon and then Thursday. It's possible you might choose to put up a couple of your weekly columns Thursday, a couple on Friday. What you see as a flaw, they see as a crafty marketing tool.

But, yeah, I see the other columns up online Thursday for the other leagues and I'm kind of anxious to see the ECAC column there, too.