When a glove owned by the editor of a hyper-local news website in Waltham went missing, he turned to the community to help him find it.
But that didn’t sit well with some social media gadflies, who called the post about the lost article of clothing “absurd” on Twitter, and balked at the write-up on Facebook.
On Thursday night, Waltham Patch Editor Ryan Grannon-Doll plastered a story about his missing North Face glove on the front of the news site with the word “MISSING” in all capital letters.
Grannon-Doll explained to the Waltham Patch community that the glove disappeared during a walk through the city on December 27.
It is a black winter glove made by North Face with a north face [sic] logo on the top mid-section of the glove. They are XL size with somewhat adhesive finger tips designed to grip objects. The glove is made to fit a right hand.
This sort of community blog post is typical of the news site, which uses its homepage to connect with local residents and help find other missing things, like dogs and cats.
However, the urgency in which the finding of the glove was presented was laughable to some people who saw the post distributed to the Twittersphere and on Facebook.
Dan O’Brien, a self-described “recovering journalist,” was also quick to call out Grannan-Doll’s community post—which was accompanied by a photo of the missing glove— and soon after, a back-and-forth between the two ensued:
Grannon-Doll, who runs the Waltham Patch Twitter account, responded by saying he had already covered the newsworthy events in the city, and was merely trying to reconnect with his lost article of clothing.
By Friday morning, the post was taken down from the Patch website.
Did a missing glove call for a homepage news splash with all capital letters as if it was a dog on the lam? No. Did O’Brien need to add salt to Grannon-Doll’s wound by emphasizing that the glove meant nothing to anyone and should be lost forever? Probably not.
Should Steve Annear have even wasted time bringing this situation to light so that the public shaming could be reiterated in an additional blog post? Not even a little bit.
But clearly, it’s a slow news week for everyone.
