Partner Pulse

By CARYN ROSE
MetsGrrl

This headline -- from the Daily News -- is causing a lot of outrage today. It’s causing fans to be angry and either harass Martino -- known as @surfingthemets on Twitter - or to post collective grar at him. Who does he think he is! How dare he! What a douchebag! I myself stopped following Mr. Martino after a tweet during spring training in which he referenced "Future Yankee Jose Reyes" (and in the interests of full disclosure, I probably hurled some grar at him before I did).

The problem is: Martino's story isn't a bad story. It's accurate. It's well-written. It reads more like a well-written fan blog than it does a story filed by a professional sportswriter, but as someone who writes a fan blog, and who can skip writing about a particular game if I feel like it, I get where he's coming from. The problem is that no one is reading the story. They’re RT’ing the link and people are clicking through and I’m sure his editor loves the pageviews he’s getting, but no one is reading the actual story. People are talking about him, but they’re not talking about how the story is oddly empathetic with the plight of Mets fans. They’re just calling him a douchebag.

I don't expect, nor want, the beat writers who cover my baseball team -- or any baseball team -- to be fans of the team. It is tough to walk the line between being a fan and being an apologist. While a fan will bring you the years of history that you internalize, it's tough to walk that line and know when that color is useful and when it’s starting to veer into homer territory.

Click here for the full article about the Mets and new media.

Read more of Caryn Rose at MetsGrrl.com.