Sometimes you just gotta vent

Tuesday night I got to cover a big Sprint Car race for the paper. I get paid a little - very little - to string for the paper. But it's not about the money. I do it because I enjoy it, because I love being at the race track and giving readers the kind of coverage of racing that I would want as a race fan.

So anyway, yesterday I wrote my follo (newspaper lingo for a follow-up story) for today's paper and sent it to the new sports editor, who has absolutely no racing background. I opened the paper today to see my story and started reading.

The first few grafs (newspaper lingo for paragraphs) were fine. But suddenly paragraphs that I had never seen before started to appear. Words and phrases that I had written were gone, replaced by considerably inferior words and phrases.

His hacking and rewriting had completely changed the substance of the story, creating factual errors in not only the description but also the chronology of events.

And, to top it all off, he completely cut almost the entire second half of the story. He eliminated quotes from key figures who I had worked hard to get interviews with, including a driver who was injured in a crash, but because of a long-time good business relationship between us, agreed to grant me an interview.

All that goodwill is out the window, and my readers think I'm a clueless hack.

I was fuming. As a newspaper writer you get used to your stuff being edited. It's just part of the job. But this was the worst hatchet job, by far, that I had ever seen.

Now I'm not so sure I want to keep working for someone like that. Why put any effort into a story when it's just going to get butchered? He wants me to cover another event this weekend. It would be three bylines, but I'm not so sure.