Several years ago, our friends at the Arkansas Times, specifically writer Stephen Steed, had a weekly all-media column called “The Good, The Bad and The Wally.”
That column featured some of the good in writing and reporting from a given week, some of the bad and the Wally – as in Wally Hall, sports editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
As a tip o’ the hat to those good ol’ days of that fun column and our friends who wrote it, we resurrect this needed, regular feature for sports fans everywhere.
Queue the music and let us begin…
March 8, 2013:
The Good
Steve Owens, the voice of the UCA Bears baseball team shares interesting stats on the team.
[tweet https://twitter.com/SteveoUCA/status/309015747705851904]The UCA Bears baseball team is good. They’ve beaten Wichita State. They’ve beaten Kansas. They’ve gotten votes for the top 25 and are 12-1. If you have a chance to get to Conway during the season to watch them play, you should. They have a stout test in Starkville, Miss., facing the SEC’s Mississippi State Bulldogs this weekend.
The Bad
Our favorite Heber Springs sports editor tweets again, under a new name. This is from a couple of exchanges between Will Gilbert and KARK’s Jay Bir, March 5 and March 6, 2013.
And after deleting his remarks about Arkansas State University’s campus being a “ghetto,” he offers a take back.
The Wally
We read Wally Hall, so you don’t have to.
In a column on Bret Bielema’s decision to close practices to the fans and limit the number of open practices to the media (this is called ‘Bielema’s blackout’ in the headline of Hall’s column March 8, 2013), we get the whining we expected from Wally, because, you know, what is Wally to do with his days this spring if he can’t watch Razorback football practices?
Speaking on behalf of sports news organizations and editors everywhere, he warns that closing these practices will affect the volume of coverage afforded to the Razorbacks:
by the statewide newspaper, television stations, radio shows and social media.
He goes on to say:
a lot of limited access to college athletes and coaches has to do with social media, which does not usually include trained journalists who know and respect the phrases like ‘off the record’ and ‘don’t quote me’.
We wonder how many of the “trained journalists” that work for Wally Hall at the “statewide newspaper” use social media?
Our experience tells us that social media, while open to and used by all, usually does include trained journalists. Lots of trained journalists. But then again, Wally only follows 16 people on Twitter. Nine of those you could consider trained journalists, like Bob Holt, a Razorback beat writer for the “statewide newspaper.”
But more importantly, we learn from Wally’s March 8 column:
A few years ago, I was at Joe Kleine’s house for a cookout, and we were in his trophy room.
More from Wally earlier this week, March 6:
Ole Miss’ stock has dropped faster than penny stocks at a day-trader carnival…
This one left us scratching our heads. What is a day-trader carnival, we wondered. An exhaustive search by our crack research department failed to turn up any “day-trader carnivals” in our area, or anywhere. Huh, we suppose there are too many day-trader freaks and not enough day-trader carnivals these days.
Additionally, we came across this Friday morning, as a further critique of the sports section of the “statewide newspaper,” and its lack of coverage of the Sun Belt Conference Tournament in Hot Springs, which starts March 8.
[tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310049058142183424] [tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310049188329160705] [tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310049488452595712] [tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310049731692855297] [tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310050481458253824] [tweet https://twitter.com/AStateFanRules/status/310050858354241536]
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