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Kindred stress the needs for gamers

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!, Oct 1, 2009.

  1. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Superior presses? Do you know how old your company's printing equipment is? 20 years old? Older? Can't just replace those every few years like you can with a laptop.

    Technology is getting faster, but that doesn't mean newspapers are keeping up.
     
  2. Presses aren't exactly cheap.
    Eight or nine years ago we got a new (used) press. Our old one was shipped to a company in Brazil. The new one, which took months to install, cost a couple million dollars.
     
  3. LWillhite

    LWillhite Member

    I think our presses are five or six years old. If you'd like to see the whole self-congratulatory deal, click this link: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/paddockprintcenter/index.html

    Among the things it touts: "Later deadlines will accommodate more and better content, from late night news to the most timely sports reporting and scores. You also will see the highest quality color reproduction in photography, graphics and advertising images. These presses will produce an improved Daily Herald for you and will be the engine that powers our continued growth."

    Clearly these words were written pre-2007.
     
  4. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Man, that's a lot of copy devoted to something that readers are almost never going to see. OK, well, your paper is one of the lucky ones then (not that new presses ever mean "later deadlines," anywhere.)

    But I did see that the old presses y'all were working on were from 1986. That should give you an idea of how often this particular technology is updated.
     
  5. expendable

    expendable Well-Known Member

    1986? Where can one get his hands on a 1986 press? That would knock some 20 years off the ones we use.
     
  6. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    Wow, what a post.
     
  7. jaredk

    jaredk Member

    Huh?
     
  8. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    The best gamer writer that I've ever read - Buster Olney. A shame that he is no longer in that part of the biz.
     
  9. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    The streets are empty on Saturday and Sunday mornings as I'm driving to the tennis courts.

    Yet deadlines are no better Friday night (unless you get a slight extension for preps), and they are worse on Saturday nights (when there is more night sports going on than any other night).

    Haven't newspapers pretty much quit doing that? Haven't they abandoned much of their suburban delivery and just decided it's not cost-effective?
     
  10. Kato

    Kato Well-Known Member

    I'm not sure about that but at our shop they basically work backwards from a delivery time to set deadlines. That means they're determining when copy gets in by the performance of a lot of part-time delivery people who show up in broken-down cars in the middle of the night to get their papers. As a result, our deadline to press is now 11:45 p.m. (drop dead) with a preferred 11:30 p.m. That means they prefer sports copy in to the desk by 10:30 p.m., which is damn-near impossible. Also these new deadlines were put in place by publishers and editors who only come into a newsroom at deadline time on election nights and don't see how the process really works on a nightly basis. Then, when you try to tell them about the difficulty of the deadline, they tell you to quit making excuses.

    That being said, I always try to write the best gamer I can.
     
  11. broadway joe

    broadway joe Guest

    Yes, and many of those people on Saturdays and Sunday mornings are at home, leisurely reading the newspaper that was on their doorstep when they woke up. Wait until 8 am and they'll be on their laptops already, getting their news from other places. The last thing you want to do is make a significant number of your readers wait around for the newspaper to arrive.
     
  12. Some Guy

    Some Guy Active Member

    I agree with this. However, often our newspapers are arrive on time at 6 a.m., filled with boxes that say, "To see the results of such-and-such a game, please log onto blahblahblah.com." Because deadlines were so early, nothing got in. So we're sending them to their laptops anyway.

    Increasingly, we're giving readers the choice between a relatively complete newspaper at 8, or an incomplete one at 6. And we're asking them to pay for it, when if they had the inclination, they could have gotten a complete version on-line at 2 a.m. for free.
     
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