Man, I'm gonna miss him. This guy wasn't just fast, he's really strong. He was a high character guy. President of LaTech FCA. He's this years Hunter Lee. Amazing that he went from walk-on to being drafted to the NFL.
Highlight
So I live in Caldwell Parish and our High School Softball team won the championship in Sulphur this past weekend. Know how much coverage there was from the News-Star? ZIP, ZERO, NADA.
They told us that the News-Star only reports news in Ouachita Parish (but they want to sell their papers in the Northeast Louisiana area). Gannett is a joke. News reporting is a joke. We have every right to criticize that a newspaper whines about not selling papers, but fills those same papers with 80% USA Today reprint. Gannett has gutted our papers and destroyed local reporting. You should be outraged over this. You should be outraged that news reporting has become a shell of its former self often taking press releases instead of actually digging for the deeper story.
I think the professor laid out some very good reasons for why Diaz wrote about the Grambling kid.
1. Local story times 2 - Monroe family and Grambling
2. Draft prospect - didn't work out but signed with a team which is still great.
I love Boston, but I was surprised he was drafted.
1. Local story times 3- from Zachary and Tech and drafted by Saints. Only the Tech thing was truly local to Monroe though
2. Draft prospect- worked out better than expected.
Going into it you can't blame Diaz for the Grambling story. Unfortunately he has a history of favoring Grambling over Tech that makes this seem like another in a long list of sleights against Tech and Tech players.
When you consider the fact that LA Tech has had 9 players drafted by the NFL since the 2014 draft, it should concern all Tech fans that Skip Holtz still managed to lose so many football games (34-20 record) over that 4-year period. And that's just considering the players DRAFTED from Tech. That doesn't include 2016 CUSA "Player of the Year" Ryan Higgins and countless other talented players who signed NFL "free agent" contracts (e.g., Houston Bates, etc...) and made NFL rosters.
Be careful.....you're starting to sound like me with your "lazy reporters" mantra. It's definitely true. One of the reasons I chose to NOT stay in Journalism as a profession so many years ago was because everybody around me was so damn lazy. The short time I was in it, I honestly felt like I was wasting my life away in that profession.
Of course, there was one BIG exception to my "lazy Journalist" warble: Buddy Davis. Buddy Davis is still the hardest working Journalist I've ever seen. At the peak of his career, Buddy used to cover and write 10 to 20 stories a day for the Ruston Daily Leader. No exaggeration. The man was as MACHINE of production!! But 99% of the rest of the reporters I knew --and even some I follow today-- are/were too lazy to walk to the mailbox. It's particularly bad in Louisiana because of the much smaller media markets. For the most part, the talent just isn't there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruston_Daily_Leader
All this "liberal" newspaper and "liberal" Gannett talk is hilarious -- like I literally laugh out loud when I read it. Every single newspaper I ever worked for leaned conservative. Every single one. And the majority of the journalists I worked with leaned conservative. The fact of the matter is that most of the South is conservative, and the newspaper demographics, while probably slightly left of the norm, were still fairly conservative.
the bold, the beautiful, theprofessor
Caldwell is one of those unfortunate areas that doesn't really fall within a coverage area. It's outside of The News-Star's core area. It's not Cenla. It's stuck in the middle. It's the same thing with Many between Shreveport and Cenla. Even LaSalle gets the short end of the stick, and the Tigers pulled the rare baseball-softball double last year. It's the old chicken vs. egg argument. We don't sell any papers in that area, so we're not going to cover it. Or do we not sell papers there because we don't report their news?
Who says I'm not outraged about things? The newspaper industry is a shell of what it was when I became a journalist. As someone who teaches journalism to young people, the state of newspapers in our country depresses me on a daily basis. I'm a newspaper guy. It hurts my heart to see what has happened. But when people say Gannett is a joke (and you're not getting an argument from me), most people relate Gannett to the local product that it owns. People believe that The News-Star is Gannett, or The Town Talk is Gannett. Those newspapers were in the community long before Gannett destroyed them, and God willing they'll be able to rebuild at least in some small fashion after Gannett no longer owns them. The local people who live and work in your communities are not Gannett. They aren't some corporate shills trying to destroy your lives. They are good people, most of whom were born and raised in the area and love that newspaper as much or more than the longtime subscribers. Nobody hurts more about what has happened to those papers than the people who have lived through the downfall. What I won't do is make this personal, and that's what pawdawg continually does. It's personal with Cory Diaz for him. He looks for any and every misstep, just aching for an opportunity to say something negative. (In my opinion, that says a whole lot more about pawdawg than it does Diaz, but that's an argument for another day.) What he either fails to recognize or refuses to admit is that Cory Diaz is a young journalist who is working his first real job for very little pay and is learning on the fly without the benefit of a real mentor who knows the area and lived through the good times. That's not Cory Diaz's fault, and I refuse to crucify him over it.
the bold, the beautiful, theprofessor