Kindred stress the needs for gamers

Great utopian column ... now back to the real world.
Example: The game story from our most important football game last Saturday was in, edited, headlined and captioned before the game ended.

 

Great read. Thanks for posting, Evil.

 

Spot on. It's great that the Poynter crowd — using that term generically — has all the solutions to everything except what the actual problem is.

 

Surprised in this day and age this subject was even taken on.
10 athletes/coaches on a night game? With deadlines what they are nowadays? The colleges in our area are all the same. You wait forever for the head coach then you get maybe 2 players dragged out to you. You are lucky if the coach isn't sitting at a podium with them.
I'd like to see the author write a gamer under these conditions.
Good luck getting anything but stock bullshit.
What you have to usually do is pick one of the athletes brought to you and try to spend extra time with one of them to get anything worth a shit. So your sources are cut down even more unless you want to jump around the room and interview four football players for two minutes each. It's not pretty out there.

As far as NFL and baseball and hockey in our area, the teams allow anybody and everybody to be interviewed. Deadline is what would be the killer there.

At least Kindred was addressing editors, because the people writing the gamers need a lot of space to do what he suggests. They also will have to be taken off doing the sidebar and notebooks if the gamers are to be this long and in depth.
What I'm saying is the current climate doesn't allow for many terrific gamers.
And no play by play? How are you going to fill at 20 inch hole when you have 20 minutes to write a gamer without some play by play?
Dream world. Dream world.

When Gannett starts the trend of all online with no deadlines, this will be more possible to achieve.

 

I think it's worth pointing out for those who obviously haven't read the column, the wish list came from Jeff D’Alessio, editor-in-chief of Sporting News Magazine and Sporting News Today. Kindred was quoting him in the column. Just want to make sure the criticism is directed at the right person.

 

Geez, guys ...

Kindred writes a nice piece, and the "yeah but" nitpicking begins.

Yes, we understand deadlines.

Yes, we understand you're not going to be able to write a 20-inch game story if the game ends five minutes AFTER your deadline.

Yes, you might not have time to talk to 10 people.

It's a wish list -- and I also add this: If you can't get that story in the newspaper when it rolls away on the truck, who's to say you can't get it onto the web in its final form -- if you want to make the effort.

What about that? Not worth it?

Only the writer and the paper and your web readership can decide.

 

Here's the perfect dream world for a sports writer hoping to write a great game story.
Can you imagine if ....
You have a 25 to 30 inch hole.
You have 3 hours upon conclusion of the game to compile quotes and write.
You don't have to do a 15 inch sidebar and 20 inch notebook.
You don't have to file a blog during and after the game both.
You don't have to file a video report in which you do commentary on the game, the online editors wanting that report "as soon as humanly possible."
You don't have to file statistics and how they scored and a short commentary on the stars of the game.
You get to interview whatever players you want with no time constraints (team wanting to get on the bus).
You have time to interview the coach and players from the opposing team as well.

Compare that to the reality of a game story writer/blogger/video dude.

No disrespect to Kindred's piece. In a perfect world game stories are interesting, insightful with little play by play.
Any discussion of this has to include realities of the situation as well.

 

Given the trend toward having beat writers opine on the teams they cover, I would add this one:

You are able to actually talk to a key player or coach because you haven't alienated him with an opinion piece that, once upon a time, a sports section would have had its (now laid-off or bought-out) veteran columnist do.

[Otherwise, that was a great topic and job by Kindred.]

 

To go along with the deadline thing, how come papers don't push deadline back and instead of the paper arriving on doorsteps at 6 a.m., they get there at 8 a.m.?
Wouldn't that alleviate a ton of proplems and allow for better gamers?
I'm lucky. For one, I have a job.
Two, I work at a weekly that covers mainly preps, some college. That allows me a lot of extra time to write gamers, which I turn into features.
Our old publisher pushed for features. We tried it and the response was nearly unanimous - the readers wanted gamers.

 

Keep up the excuses, guys. That's what's going to save the industry.

Can't do this. Can't do that. My editor won't let me write longer. Deadlines are too early.

Last time I checked, most college football and NFL games ended in plenty of time to work the locker room. So it's not like the entire sportswriting world has 10 minutes to file.

I thought these were pretty handy tips and yet another well-done piece by one of the best in the business, Dave Kindred.

 

Here's just one more way the lords of newspapering have failed:

For all the technological advances in this business, no one really has figured out a way to shorten the time from the drop-dead moment pages go to press (let's say 1 a.m.) and the point when the newspaper hits the average reader's front porch. That hasn't changed in 50, maybe 75 years, or so it seems.

I'm not offering this as an excuse for anything, but wouldn't you think that all the space-age stuff we've embraced would find a way to shorten that window for the paper product?

 

I thought this thread would be about the importance of this guy