"Mainstreaming" sports stories onto 1A

I can't begin to tell you how evil jumps from on section to another are. I rarely see it done, for good reason.

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At USA Today we had a "Page 1 desk" that massaged everything that went out there. After a couple of years of dealing with them, though, my stuff -- on those rare occasions when I got a 1A story - made it through largely undamaged. But I had grown to understand their approach.

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For the most part, what I am observing at some other papers is sports stuff, written by the sports staff, played above the fold on the front. In our shop, we're more likely to tease the most interesting sports story with a skybox, with the exceptions I suggested.

 

We're most likely to run a stand-alone photo with a caption telling readers to check out more in the sports section.

 

One of our high school's won a state title in baseball this spring and we had a big photo on A1 with a fan reax story and reefer to gamer and notebook on B1. This is the only situation where I could really see us putting anything sporty as the main package on the front. In a situation like that, the team winning a state title is going to be the biggest thing going on in town that day, so why not feature it on the front.

 

My old paper, the Messenger-Inquirer, used to do that all the time. One time, the front page above the fold story was about robins in winter. Folks were wondering why they were still around in winter and why they seemed so fat (fluffing feathers was the reason). We talked with experts and had a great little story that explained the phenomena.

That kind of story would never see the light of day today. Sad.

 

This.

Sports stories can be great out front, even if they're not the tradition HIGH FUCKING IMPACT stories that normally go out there.

 

An ongoing issue that I was dealing with back in the 1980s, and I'm sure many others were. It's a real balancing act -- "buried" on 1A vs. the big lead (lowercase) on 1C. I always felt if you were going to take a big sports story on 1A, it should be above the fold, or at least not stuck down in one of the corners. Then you get into the whole "well, if it's one of the five biggest/best stories of the day, 1A is where it belongs."

 

During my run a semi-major metro, I had a few stories make the jump from Sports to 1A. They were massaged and prodded and kicked around and finger-fucked into a mishmash of gobbledygook by office-bound blowhards out to justify their existence. What a nightmare.

 

Oh, I remember some pretty intense editing sessions with 1A types, turning a sports story into something that "non-sports people" would understand and be able to fathom why it was on 1A...nut graphs stating the obvious, etc. Yeah, nightmarish is an apt description for some of that.