Joe Miller: Why Temp Editor Joe Tone Won’t Be Missed at the Pitch

Editor Rule #1: Protect your reporters.
 
Even if you know you’re going to have to downsize them on Friday, protect them.
 
If someone attacks one of your reporters: lash out, fight. It’s your job to make reporters look good and feel happy. And no one, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE can make them feel bad, except YOU. Punish all extra-editorial transgressions immediately and severely.
 
If, say, some overweight, droopy-eyed blogger were to refer to one of your reporters as, say, a chickenhead, it is your obligation decree that said blogger “will never appear in the pages of MY FUCKING PAPER except in stories written for the sole purpose of DESTROYING him!” (Decree must be shouted.)
 
This is especially true for a publication such as the Pitch, where you have the freedom to write really nasty things about really nasty people.
 
In fact, legend has it that there was once a reporter at the Pitch who wrote a long cover feature about KCTV-5, in which it was reported that Dave Helling would be the star of the perennial-Neilson-runner-up’s run for number one, despite the fact that Helling was essentially demoted on the very day that the issue hit the shelves, and then a certain gossip columnist at a certain daily paper (who would later be downsized and would go on to create a certain group blog that you’re probably reading right now) made fun of the Pitch’s reporter and his egg-on-the-face-got-it-totally-wrong cover story, and the gossip columnist’s column so pissed off the Pitch editor at the time that she vowed to GET HIM FIRED!
 
Editor Rule #2: Don’t run lame, old news.
 
I don’t mean weeks-old stuff. I mean YEARS-old. I mean stories that first appeared on KCUR’s KC Currents in 2004. I mean subjects that have won your readers’ choice awards for five years running.
 
Don’t write about that shit. It’s old.
 
So, as you can see, this editor stuff is pretty simple. Just two rules. Everything else is fair game.
 
And, alas, Joe Tone, former editor of the Pitch, violated Editor Rule #1.
 
(OK so I know this is old news but I’m emboldened by the sale of the Pitch from Micheal Lacey to some little company in Nashville, and I know that Andy Van De Voorde can no longer hurt me.)
 
A couple weeks ago, Tone wrote a big, wet, swallow-it blow job about Troggy Bottle-hole, author of the popular blog Tony’s Kansas City.
 
Not only that, he hired scantily-clad models to come pose with the ugly bastard.
 
This is about as close to cardinal sin as a KC newsperson can get.
 
In fact, when it came out, my first thought was that the staffers at the Pitch might well have cause to file a sexual discrimination case. I’m not kidding. To write a puff piece about a guy who calls one of your best, loyal reporters, Nadia Pflaum, a chickenhead?
 
Fucking disgrace.
 
Good riddance.