Pre-packaged agate

Anybody use pre-packaged agate, dealt with it in the past, considering dealing with it now?

What are some of the opinions?

From what you've seen, can local be integrated smoothly with national?

 

We've had the MLB and NFL since it started and had the NBA until it was scratched.

With the slashing and gashing of staff, it's been a godsend.

Never had a problem with packaging, deadline or customer service.

Thumbs up, in my humble opinion.

 

For baseball, It was a lifesaver and timesaver when I was a one-man band. Just left a hole for it, downloaded it at a certain time every night and built the baseball roundup around it. At least with the company we dealt with, they'd even put in the late games from the night before. We didn't subscribe to the NFL package, since the only day we needed to worry about agate was for Monday's paper.

 

We have both MLB and NFL and we love having it. After having to build agate pages by myself at my previous post, coming here to a world of click and drag entire packages was like the sky opening up and hearing the angels sing. We are able to just package with capsules around it or use local baseball stories we have with whatever space we have that day. It's great for Sunday's when I have to work desk myself when it's my turn, just a time saver all around.

 

We have the baseball package from the CanWest service. Leaves us space on one side to do roundups on each league and below to place the jump from our local MLB team's gamer (or stretch the boxes out if need-be).

 

We have a full MLB agate page and a half page of agate covering everything else. It's basically freed up seven shifts a week for us. A very good thing.

 

Used the MLB from AP at my old shop and it was pretty nice.

 

What companies provide this?

 

We're a Gannett site and we use an MLB page sent by USA Today. While it does save loads on labor, it does have its problems, especially since we're in an MLB market. For instance, the USAT folks decide on which late boxes to run for which edition. So if our club is on the West Coast, we usually have to run their late boxes on our agate page for all editions two days later. Readers have really picked up on this problem and do not like it. Long story short, if you're going this route try to have as much input as possible on the content you receive.

 

Keans, why can't your desk just work up the boxes that are affected by this and put them on a live page, maybe with a refer on the prefab page... Weakened packaging is better than weakened content, right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, as I've not worked in a shop with prefab agate packages, but I've been a makeup editor / rim guy / slot guy at a biggish shop and we did that when necessary. Do you get the pages as non-editable PDFs or are they InDesign or Quark pages that you can update?

 

It may be easier than I'm thinking, but the idea of formatting baseball boxes on InDesign or Quark would give me nightmares.

 

Done both and was never a big problem. Mainly just using style sheets.