Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Kellis Robinett graduated from Kansas in 2005.
He was sports editor of this very paper.
He wrote a few articles for a Jayhawk blog while covering Idaho college sports for the Idaho State-Journal.
And last week, he accepted a job offer at the Wichita Eagle. He is their new Kansas STATE sports beat reporter.
The K-State fans, at least the ones who read the Eagle’s Wildcat blog, are upset. They’ve been plastering the blog’s comment boards with rage-driven messages such as these:
Comment by OP_Cat: …Please leave before this gets too ugly. You will never be accepted in the K-State Nation and this is not a controversy that is going to go away any time soon.
Comment by Catfan06: What a joke. Bye-bye subscription.
Comment by GrumpyCat: Wouldn’t bother moving to Manhattan, Squawk blogger. Maybe you should re-consider this position before you pack up and move. Seriously.
Both Robinett and the deputy editor for news made retaliatory posts to defend themselves.
Some of the anger stems from the Eagle’s claim that they shut down “The Jayhawk Lounge,” a KU fan blog, because it doesn’t allow it’s writers to maintain personal blogs. Wildcat fans claim Robinett rips on Kansas State in several articles on the site.
But it’s Robinetts’ work for the Kansan that Wildcat fans find most troubling. In the 2005 Homecoming issue, Robinett ranked the football and basketball venues in the Big 12. Kansas State finished eighth.
The fans are enraged mostly by the start of one sentence in that article, one that’s been copied and pasted all over the Kansas State message boards:
“Yes, there’s a lot to hate about Manhattan…”
As an aspiring journalist, I think Robinett has the right to bash Manhattan if he provides his rationale. And he does, saying the football stadium still had wooden seats and that the PowerCat is “the most generic logo in the country”.
But Robinett must realize that as a KU alum, he will have to work twice as hard to gain the respect of his Wildcat readers.
The fans are the ones in the wrong here. It would be understandable if they disliked Robinett because he did a poor job covering Kansas State sports. But he hasn’t had a chance to do poorly or well yet: he’s covered the teams for a week.
It’s unfortunate that Robinett may lose his job because the fans he works for are either questioning every word he writes or abandoning the Eagle completely. It’s a bad situation for both sides.
But the Wildcat fans should give him time to prove he can be an unbiased, in-depth Kansas State sports reporter before showing him the door.
— — Edited by Betsy Cutcliff
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Comments
Wildcats not wild for new sports writer
The most important thing to consider when he wrote "there's a lot to hate about Manhattan," is that he was a Kansan columnist writing to KU Students at the time. As a columnist, you write to entertain your readers, and that's exactly what he was trying to do. The fact that he wrote it as a college student still learning the trade doesn't mean he has any biases four years later, having become a more professional journalist in that time. All these K-State fans are doing is pulling up something miniscule and harmless to crucify Kellis while leaving out all the great reasons he should have the job. If you ask me, the only bias I see is coming from these readers who won't give him a chance because he's a Jayhawk.
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