Ok so Yahoo turned down my second submission and spit at my third submission.



I wrote a 1200 word article and submitted it to Yahoo. This work is good it’s not like the shit articles I post here (but better than the Avantika D’s articles Yahoo publishes every week). Y! Journalist Mr. Kunal D asked me to reduce the word count to 700 words and resubmit which I did. I waited for a week and on Jan 9th he asked me to wait indefinitely because he was swamped, he specifically said this in his 2nd email reply to me on that date:



I will surely give it a once-over when time permits, but I cannot give you a timeline for the same.



Naturally I was confused and in a dilemma because on one hand I was glad that he didn’t put my submissions to the bin like the incompetent pricks at DailyO and The Print but on the other hand what does this leave me with? Am I supposed to wait forever to get a reply which might be negative and leave me with lost opportunity to submit it elsewhere?



I started submitting it elsewhere and everywhere LoL. Let Mr Kunal take his time to review my reduced, diluted and frankly speaking an inferior 800 word version of my write up while I submit my 1200 word article in its original glory elsewhere. I wasn’t too excited at the prospect because my previous experience told me that getting a media house to publish something is very tough if the person who wrote it is an average citizen who is not famous or anything really (classist bias story)



Submission got rejected or not even considered by almost each and every person I submitted it to. News Laundry, Firstpost, News18, Scroll, Huffpost, Washington Post (a person can dream), USAToday (why not, its just an email) all of them rejected it. NDTV, India Today, HT Media outright refused to allow me to submit. Gulf News and few other websites didn’t reply or respond. While this spate of rejections were going on without respite I came back to Yahoo. I sent a new submission to Mr Kunal and then a few days later reminder email of the past submission. He didn’t reply. He never replied to me after Jan 9th. I sent an email to rest of his team at Yahoo whose emails Mr Shishir Bhate the editor of Yahoo! India had sent me long back. Nobody replied. So I emailed Mr Shishir directly. He replied:



My senior colleague has informed you about the issues with your article.

I am afraid we shall not be able to use this article of yours.



Mr. Shishir might be referring to the Kunal’s 1st Jan 9th email message to me which was:

You articles need heavy editing to be in adherence to our stylesheet.



Yes the first part of the message by Mr. Shishir isn’t entirely inaccurate but I asked Mr Kunal D what i should do to make it acceptable and he told me what I quoted in the starting portion of this write up. Mr Kunal D didn’t reject my write up. He asked me to wait indefinitely. I felt I needed a better explanation and I asked for that. Mr Shishir repeated his earlier message and asked me not to email him anymore. I repeated my query stressing on the fact that I was asked to wait all this time by Yahoo. If my article was being rejected for non adherence to their style-sheet (whatever the fuck that is) then why was I not informed of this decision back in Jan 9th? Despite not getting a response I made a new oped submission and to this he responded exactly like this:



Request you to stop spamming and harassing us. I will report you to the authorities.



That was very hurtful, this is like the ultimate level of shitty response. So next morning I called to his number and demanded an explanation (yes call me entitled for that) and he said that my submission was a “rubbish” and I asked him why he kept the me waiting for 1 month and 6 days if it was rubbish (not the exact quote). He didn’t reply to this point directly, he however promised Police complaint on his behalf by one of his team members in Kochi or Calicut (news flash: Yahoo has employees in Calicut!) the next time I called him or his team at Yahoo India (new called Verizon Media: Company name got changed recently).



My Analysis;



A friend of mine who is an editor at a prominent Internet Publication told me after reading the experience as I listed it out in my Twitter told me this:

You’ve got a very entitled attitude. Please understand that no one owes you anything. I feel like you don’t respect other people’s time. You are sending an unsolicited article to a publication, you have to respect editorial decision when they tell you it’s not good enough, not go on a rant on twitter.

She also said: I’m sorry buddy, but you’ve overstepped a number of boundaries here and I’m afraid I can’t engage with you anymore



She stands with Shishir on this I guess and no more a friend or even a contact I suppose :( .



Anyway her message to me was for my own good and I recognize that but is this here a case of me getting pissed off by their decision? No, I got pissed off by his behavior, specifically comments about my submission by the Y! editor. Its not cool. Now Shishir was the most responsive of all the editors I ever approached bck in Oct - November but here when I asked for an explanation for my wait period and reason for rejection he became unresponsive and then angry.



This guy has 32 Years of Experience in the Media/Journalism which is way more than my age. He don’t need to be told by me how to behave. He has been an internet Publication editor since 1997. 32 years of Journalism experience gives him the license to diss my work? At the end of the day Mr. Shishir Bhate must understand the fact that he cant treat people badly no matter how good his publication is or how long his experience is. When a person is made to wait 1 month and 6 days by his team then he owes that person a valid response, also never diss the work of another person because nobody spent so much of their effort to write something and then wait 1 month for a senior editor to label it as rubbish (1st submission which is a major write up for me) and threaten FIR! (he threatened to make complaints against me when I submitted a separate smaller Oped). I never got a response for that Oped submission. Will I ever get a response?



So is it me being entitled or senior editor forgetting his basic etiquette and manners that led to this?

Probably a mix of both might be my neutral view (:P) but I sincerely believe that Mr. Shishir behaved badly.



Hard-To-Beat will update this write up with a comment by Shishir Bhate should he choose to give one.

Disclosure: Hard-To-Beat is hosted in a platform owned by a sister concern of Verizon Media.

