Your Friendly Neighborhood Writer

Another week, another good-bye party. Our publisher Mike O’Sullivan is leaving after more than 20 years with The Record/The Saratogian.

This is not what you want to read from someone at corporate after half of your newsroom and sports department has been laid off or taken a buyout:

Oh, thanks for that clarification.

  How can we stop racism? By better education? By enforcing laws? By outing racists on the Internet and then campaigning to have them fired from their jobs? This is how one group of activists have gone about the problem with their Tumblr site Getting Racists Fired. Getting Racists Fired is where oeople can out racists by submitting their toxic and dumbass Facebook posts, tweets, comments and images to the site, where they are shared in a bid to shame the individual. The site then urges its followers to write and phone the individual’s employer to have them fired for clowning themselves in public with their racist social media pollution… To this end, they have posted details of what to say when phoning a company about a racist employee: Here’s a script of what you can say while calling employers “Hello can I speak to a manager on duty? I have a complaint to make about one of your employees” “Yes hello, my name is ______ and I’ve been seeing some very disturbing and disgusting racist comments coming from one of your works. Their name is ____” ” I know that your business is not one that would condone such...

From my colleague Kevin Moran who has been in the biz I bit longer than I:

"Just not the same in the newsroom the day before a big storm is supposed to hit since Joe Hack retired. I miss his snow bomb sign and the story about this could be the mother of all storms. I DO NOT miss having to climb on the roof with Jan Shields and a hockey stick to wipe the snow off the satellite dish so all copy makes it into the feed."

Overall, I'm a big fan of our new system in which I get faxes and even voicemail via email. And then, sometimes, something like this will happen where a fax is upside down.

(Because the Congresswoman I'm trying to get a hold of is new and not yet listed in the online directory).

Following a five minute wait on hold, I reach an operator:

Operator: "U.S. House of Representatives Switchboard."

Me: "Hi. My name is Danielle Sanzone. I'm a reporter with The Record newspaper in Troy, NY. How're you doing?"

Operator: Long Pause. "U.S. House of Representatives Switchboard."

Me: "Hi. I'm looking for Elise Stefanik." (I may have mispronounced her name a little)

Operator: "Whose office is she in?"

Me: "She was just elected to Congress."

Operator: Long Pause.

Me: It's spelled S-T-E...

Operator: "Oh, I got it. She's new. Hold please...."