highschoolsports.net

I'm wondering how fellow Gannett employees are liking the new high school sports Web site. Got to say, not a fan. It's slow. It needs rosters typed in despite being low on manpower. And it's a pain in the ass to reverse publish box scores. Anybody else having to use this on Friday nights?

 

I hated it because at my old shop, we were on OS 9 and couldn't open the site on the decrepit version of IE we used. Three days before the tab is due, I start calling to find out why I'm not getting schedules and every AD sings "just print them off highschoolsports.net." That would be great if I could get to the damn site.

 

I actually found the site very useful last year. But with the changes made to it, it really has become a pain in the ass and not very user friendly.

 

Very user unfriendly program/software, especially if your goal is to take summaries on some 140 games from around the state.

Lots of bugs that need to be fixed.

Very disappointing, because our high school stats editor and newsroom IT guy had created their own data base and summaries program using filemaker that they had tweaked and modified over the last 8 years, and now it feels like we've taken several gigantic steps backwards.

 

I think that's the problem for a lot of us. We've taken years to come up and tweak a program that works great for us. Now, we're all taking huge steps in the wrong direction.

 

Sadly, the person who thought this was a great idea probably got a big-ass raise while the people that have to implement this crap are hoping to have jobs in six months.

 

Gannett's aware that high school sports exist? From where I'm located, the small-town Gannett papers no longer have sports editors, and the Saturday morning editions feature photos of 12-year-old kids standing next the deer they just shot with a weapon in their hands.

A long-time colleague of mind, and a damn good one at that, who worked at a small Gannett paper, left his shop for a job in radio. Why? Because, "Gannett is expediting the demise of our industry."

 

Raise, hell. The technology is so 1980s, some large kickbacks probably were required as well.

 

Wait, does this mean Gannett no longer has Preps Factory? Oh, what a joy that used to be.

 

Gannett did not create highschoolsports.net. It purchased it from its creator, a Jersey guy who gave us his service free for about two years so he work out all the bugs and try to market it to other papers.. It worked the way it was suppoed to about 1/2 the time, which obviously was good enough for Gannett.
Needless to say, we are not about to pay for this service from Gannett. We've developed our own database that should be operating when football season opens in 10 days.

 

That, to me, is the main advantage of HSS.net. It's not PrepsFactory.
However, our deadlines are so ungodly early on Friday nights that we don't even get box scores in time to attempt to reverse-publish them, so I can't say that we're really having problems with HSS.net.

 

So when are papers going to adjust their deadlines to getting the news on the web ASAP even if they can't get it in the next day's paper?