M&WN: In Response to Our Critics

Wait! What?!? There are actually people out there being critical of the fine job your contributing writers here at Maroon & White Nation do?

Hard to believe, I know, but YES.

No, no one really seems to complain the articles are inaccurate or anything like that. Primarily it is stuff like accusing us of POOR JOURNALISM.

(I personally found it downright nostalgic the way he accidentally-on-purpose got the name of the site wrong. Took me right back to junior high.)

To all those who are of the opinion that the M&WN staff are guilty of poor journalism, you are dead wrong. We aren’t guilty of any type of journalism whatsoever! No journalists on staff here. We have a contractor, a teacher, a meteorologist, an engineer, a nurse, an accountant, an MSU student, a high school student, etc., but no professional writers. What we all have in common is that we are fans. This is a site on the FANSided Network. One would think that “FanSided” being right up there at the top of the page would be sufficient for people to realize that we are but fan bloggers. You can go right ahead and tell us what we should have learned in Journalism 101, and we’ll take note of it, because not a one of us has ever taken a journalism course.

Not to say, however, that we don’t provide Mississippi State Bulldogs fans with the news that they want to hear. Maroon & White Nation was pretty much the first place to report the official hiring of Coach Howland or to have the video of the Panama City Beach ruckus. We may not be journalists, but what we are is dedicated to serving our fans.

This may be the root of much of the confusion. We often do such a fine job of delivering important, breaking news about Mississippi State that we are mistaken for one of the bigger, professional news sites. Quite honestly, we cannot find the comparisons to major news outlets to be anything but flattering.

Another popular criticism is that Maroon & White Nation is just a MSU hype machine.

Seriously? What exactly do you expect a site run by hard-core Bulldawg fans to publish? It’s also not as if sites associated with other teams don’t do the same thing. Don’t blame us for doing it better than they do.

The claim is also frequently made that all we do is talk about umiss.

What we do is write about what our Mississippi State fan readers want to know about, what they need to know about, and what they may find of interest. I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe a word has been said yet on M&WN about Chancellor Dan Jones. We did, however, think that our Missisippi State fan readers would be interested to know that after Bo Bounds had Coach34 on his show to discuss #TheNetwork, all umiss coaches and media immediately quit going on Bo’s show despite the fact that they had some impressive stuff going on over there (like making the NCAA basketball tournament) that one would think they’d be pretty anxious to hype. It also may be of interest to our fans that ninety minutes after that story published, Coach Hugh Freeze took a break from his golf game to go run Bo down at the Pro-Am tournament Bo was covering to make sure he got his photo taken with him.

My question, though, is this: Why shouldn’t we write more about umiss than some umiss sites do these days? Obviously many umiss fans read Maroon & White Nation more than some umiss sites right now. In fact, I think that a lot of credit must be given to all our umiss fan readers for helping make Maroon & White Nation the #1 most read college site on the FanSided Network for 2014….and currently #1 in 2015.

We pride ourselves in publishing material that people want to read. We’re not fans of some of the unkind things people say about what we write or how we write it, but we can promise you this: You keep reading it, and we’ll keep writing it!

I’d like to finish this article with a quote from former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who said:

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticized anyway."

Or, as I translate that into today’s vernacular: You do you! Haters gonna’ hate.