Kindred stress the needs for gamers

A 15-inch gamer that's analytical. That's doable, but you can't explain much with that.

 

It's both, in most cases.

A) Readers have made it clear they do NOT want a paper in their driveway any later than 7 a.m. (Not that they say they have time to read it in the morning anyway.) Mid-morning delivery just absolutely does not work, in most any market. P.M. delivery's been dead for years.

B) There are no paperboys (or girls) anymore, and delivery carriers are often unionized these days. That equates to them having a set schedule, and overtime pay (which is highly costly) if they go over their hours. With newspapers reaching for higher circulation figures outside their core markets, that means carriers have to spend more time driving, which means deadlines must be earlier to give them time to get the paper there on time.

There are a lot of other factors, of course, but everyone wants a piece of the pie. Fact is, there's not enough to go around.

 

Hey, deadline problems all go away once you take out that silly printing-a-newspaper-and-delivering-it-to-people step.

Someday we'll all work for web sites where we can do exactly what Kindred's piece suggests, so you'd better not forget how to do it in the meantime.

 

Um, thanks for the snark. Of course that's important, too. Just trying to share some of the information I've learned on the rare occasions when I've rubbed shoulders with management-types who have to deal with these issues.

 

I'm not sure Kindred's model works even then. The web stresses immediacy -- the emphasis is on getting something up on the site as soon as possible. Sure, you theoretically have time to go back and update as much as you want, but in the real world, while you're doing quick-and-dirty interviews and getting that insta-analysis gamer up on the site, those 10 players and coaches you'd like to talk to more in-depth are heading out the door.

 

Instead of bashing kindred and D'Alessio, why not pick up some pointers on what you can do to improve your gamers.
Can't talk to 10? try three or five and see if you improve.
Some deadlines make it impossible to do great work, but if you apply a little bit of what they are suggesting, it might help you become a little better at what you do instead of just whining about how what they are saying is impossible.
Sheesh.

 

Sorry, but I thought that was a really naive suggestion. I mean, why would you deliver the morning paper when it's too late for a large portion of your customers to read it? Newspapers are fighting the perception that they're already outdated by the time they hit the doorstep as it is. The last thing they want to do is make readers wait even longer for it.

 

Dave is a wonderful guy and terrific writer and journalist, but the conditions of which he speaks to produce the kind of gamers he talks about was last seen in the early '90s.

Fredrick's laundry list of what a writer has to produce these days is spot on---it's not whining.

 

I'm not trying to whine. I think my gamers are pretty damn good and they do NOT include play by play. I'm just saying ... think tankers need to work for my company. It's a LOT of fucking work. Take away the sidebar and the 20 inch notes and the how they scored and video crap thing I have to do and the stars of the game. It's WORK. Think tankers don't work for my company.

 

I'm just saying it's a 2 way street. The company has to cooperate and the company does not cooperate with deadlines and amount of work needed in many different mediums (write it, blog it, broadcast it after the game on video). You guys who support Kindred's piece don't seem to care that management has to cooperate to get a better game story. And management doesn't care. It wants quantity and video and blogs as well. Carry on.

 

Fair enough. I withdraw my rude response.
I guess, in my mind, I'm merging this train of thought with the other query about technology: i.e., why aren't our deadlines improving with today's superior presses? It seems that, for every 15 minutes we seem to gain with better technology, we give back 30 minutes because the delivery carriers want to finish earlier. And, as Buck mentioned, some papers are stretching their coverage areas which requires longer drive times.

 

I'm no think-tanker. I've been there. I've written everything you've written, a thousand times, from training tables, in showers, on team buses, before the game ends, at halftime, after walking the sidelines in the snow trying to see the yard stripes for the stats and finding a pay phone to dictate the crap. Enough with your think-tank blather. The column was to sports editors. I signalled that in the first five words. They should be fighting our battles with management. I said it was the ideal I was looking for -- reach for the stars, all that idealistic junk that apparently nobody wants to hear except me. So do this: send me -- I'll keep it private -- send me links to one of those day's work you cite. I can use it as an example in a column about management asking too much in a time when quality is disappearing and the readers know it.