No gamer on front page?

Because the design thread is as dead as Keith Richards :...



This designer chose NOT to put the Dolphins' gamer on the front. Interesting.

What's your take? With the traditional game story losing its importance -- at least in some publications -- is this a direction more will take in the future?

 

Could have been a deadline issue. Easy to get a good centerpiece photo, cook up a strong headline and subhead, put in an early column and put the lead gamer inside with a refer.

I'm not condoning this, but it smells of a production issue with tight, tight deadlines cooked up by people who have no clue with sports.

 

I don't like it.

It wouldn't kill the design to shrink that fact box a little and run the gamer one column and at least get the first few graphs in.

I hate to sound like DyePack, but it's a classic case of being drunk with design and forgetting to actually do your job.

 

I don't mind it.
Nationally televised game, season opener of pro football, you'd have to think that people would know the result.
Put your name columnist with some analysis out front. Then refer to all the coverage inside.
At previous stops we did the same thing with all the football coverage. Called them poster covers. Giant art and hed with a column and scoreboard. For preps it was top performers and a whiparound of the games that were covered. For the lead college and pro games, we'd have a keys to the game package and then refers to expanded coverage inside.
Readers liked it and the APSE judges loved it.

 

Agreed 110%. This is not serving the reader. And there's no indication from the reeferage that the gamer would be on A1.

Jay, I'm sure you don't look at it this way either. But the day we let APSE judging make decisions for what we do, it's time for a little introspection.

 

Correct. Don't mistake my earlier post for defending what was done. To clarify: If I was correct in my earlier post, then someone in production is the tail wagging the dog.

If I was wrong, then it just sucks for readers.

 

Another thing, that headline is a trainwreck.

 

Was it a wraparound or the section front?

 

It's probably a wraparound, but the gamer wouldn't be in the main section, away from a Dolphins Extra section. And I would suspect the "designer" didn't make this decision. Not putting a gamer on the front of a Dolphins Extra section goes way above a designer.

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that.

Honestly, this belongs on the front page of the sport section, with a teaser on A1. Sports is for sports, unless it's a major championship game.

 

I've seen this done before. I think the Chicago Tribune did this during the playoffs and series last year.

If the paper's trending toward where columns and analysis are more important than gamers, I can kind of see this.

But we are losing sight of the importance of game coverage, whether it's pros or preps.

 

This is the Sun-Sentinel --- it's not that type of paper. Given the fact that the column mentions the final score and Culpepper's lack of performance, it wasn't an early column.

Y'all have to remember ... to most South Floridians, there's the Dolphins and then there's All The Other Teams, coming in a quite-distant second place to the Dolphins.

No problem with this coverage in this situation. With preps, you need to have a gamer up front because not everybody saw the game in question. With an NFL primetime season-opening game on network TV featuring The Only Sports Team South Florida Actually Cares About playing against the defending Super Bowl champs ... trust me, the sports readers down there definitely saw the game and won't need a 20-inch rehash.