News stealing sports for 1A

Complete agreement with BillyT.

 

We're in a market where street sales are more important than usual, so A1 should take whatever it needs to sell the paper, no matter what effect it has on the inside covers.

I'm not a real big fan of planning the news. Today's A1 has two stories we couldn't possibly have predicted Friday. I would guess that had our bubble team made it, we'd have increased our NCAA presence on A1 to include the obligatory leaping-for-joy shot. Because they didn't make it, no such photo existed, and Sports had to do something creative anyway. Sports would have had to adjust either way.

 

Frank: I certainly disagree with the idea of "patches," the word a news designer I worked with used for the layouts he left on Friday for the Sunday and Monday fronts. They often took up a large chunk of the page.

I distinctly remember we had a fatal plan crash one Saturday and what should have been a big lead photo ran as a 2-column by 3-inch photo.

That said, I think you do have to do some planning, and this Monday front (or Tuesday if you have a women's team) needs to take the tournament into account.

Baron: That was poor planning, but not on the part of sports.

 

It's also the responsibility of the sports editor to bring to the attention of the news side the possibility for 1A sports presence.

 

How was the sports editor to know that Local Team would actually make the tournament and get a #3 seed with a 25-7 record?

 

Good discussion here. I agree that your Sunday night A1 has to be flexible enough to account for breaking news, but I don't think an NCAA bid should have been a surprise.

Again, the key is planning and communication between the sports editor and news editors (who often split by Friday afternoon).

Now, something like a soldier killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan? Or a big enough local crime story? That's where A1 plans can be adjusted and/or scrapped.

And there's a whole other discussion about how staff cutbacks have affected how much "news" is even covered on Saturday and Sunday. Oftentimes at our shop (a 20K daily), sports are about the only "live" things covered on the weekend ... so it's a planned centerpiece on Sunday A1 (with possibly a weekend event/news story on the bottom), and then features-a-plenty on Monday.

 

Be sure you get a nice box to pack your stuff in.

 

I don't mine a story of mine going on A1. Happens about twice a year. What I do mind is the news side idiots editing in mistakes, writing horseshit headlines and calling me to ask questions like: "Do you think we need a graph explaining to our readers what the NCAA Basketball Tournament is?)

Also, the three times in 20 years they've misspelled my name on the byline, despite the fact that I put the byline in every time.

 

I can understand being upset, for sure. But you mention 1A taking "my photo." Didn't your photographer get more than one picture? Let's say your photo was a shot of the team leaping in celebration at the news. OK, so that photo got taken. What about the photos of players embracing, the team's star player rejoicing, the coach getting congratulated, fans celebrating, etc.?
As others have said, there was certainly a communications breakdown all around. But I would think there should be several photos to choose from. From the sounds of it, there was only one photo to use here. That's another communications breakdown.

 

Are you sure they misspelled your name, Hnoud?

 

Ace: Assuming the team got a No. 3 seed, sports must have known the team would get a bid.

I cannot think of many papers where a local team getting a bid wouldn't be on the front.

 

We actually wound up with a new verb out of one of these situations. Gotta be 10-15 years ago now.

Our beat writer did a great feature on our local college coach, and we pushed it for the front, because it was really good.

Wound up getting a small picture and three inches on the cover, with the rest inside.

From then on, running three or four inches of a 30-inch feature on the front was "calhouning" the story.