Card game columns?

Is having a bridge column viable nowadays in the paper? Do enough people play it to warrant a column still?
Our paper runs Phillp Alder's everyday and I hate checking it for errors...because I don't know jack about the game.

Without doing much research, is there someone that maybe does a cribbage or euchre column instead?

Heck, if there isn't and someone wants to hire me...by all means, fire me an e-mail!

 

Your paper still has a news hole for a bridge column?

That's pretty remarkable.

 

Not sure about papers, but oh for the olden days, when Sports Illustrated wasn't a shell and delivered the hard-hitting, in-depth stories.

 

Oh yeah, right next to Dear Abby, the Suduko puzzle and Bulletin Board items...the first page I pound out in our B section.

The main reason I bring this up is because a reader complained to our ME that sometimes the graphic that goes with the bridge column is wrong.
She point-blank told him there would be no way anyone in the newsroom would know if it was right or wrong because none of us play bridge! He was pretty pissed I guess.
Hopefully he took his heart pills that day or I may have had to write another obit.

 

The Times will run one as long as the Times exists.

Believe Goren lasted in SI through the late '60s. Subject to correction, there.

Game enjoyed two huge surges . .. the late 20s/early 30s (Ely Culbertson, et al), and the 50s/early 60s
(the Era of the broad popularity of the Goren point count). Game isn't as popular as it was, but it remains enormously-popular among certain niche elites (wildly popular on Wall Street . . . Buffett''s been a huge player, forever). Contract bridge (the conventional moidern version) remains one of the great card games ever devised.

 

I think we work at the same paper ... we have all of those. And Family Circus, which sucks.

 

Jeffy and PJ do not appreciate your tone, at all.

 

Who said that?

Notme!

 

My old paper ran the Adler column. I don't think anyone checked it since production did the comics page.

 

At our paper, the bridge graphic has the pub date printed on the bottom right. If it matches the date on the column, I figure we're good. Not that I'd have the slightest idea if it was wrong.

 

One place I worked, not only did we have one of the syndicated columns, we also had a local bridge column, written by some grand master or whatever the equivalent in bridge is. The one person who could ever get the grid right, since it had to be done by hand, was the newsroom clerk, and it all went to hades when she left to student teach. At least he was patient enough to explain how it should look when she left.

 

My hometown paper had a syndicated bridge column and a local bridge column in the 1970s and 80s. I would check the local column to see the standings because my Grade 4 teacher played.
Maybe I'm misguided but I always thought it was a waste of space that was read by only 20-30 people. But maybe youth sports copy and roundups is only read by 20-30 people as well.