RIP: Agate in LAT sports pages

Agate is for small minds.

 

Used to. Don't know now.

 

I don't know. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I've always thought of the agate page is the one place in which you can --- to a certain extent --- include EVERYTHING that happened that day in sports, all in one place and possibly the only place these events will get a mention in your publication.

Golf scores, tennis scores, auto racing results, transactions, standings, schedules. And of course, preps.

The "they can find that anywhere" reasoning I just don't buy because, well, I can get a story on that Lakers game or a column on Jerry Buss anywhere, also. No, it may not be YOURS, L.A. Times, but yours isn't necessarily better. Especially when it has nonsense like crediting Buss for acquiring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

At least the agate page is, by and large, the most accurate page in the paper. In addition to more than carrying its weight in ratio of information to space.

 

Not if there are prep results, particularly for small sports. At least in my experience, the agate page is loaded with errors if you're looking for them. AP agate often has small mistakes, a golfer shooting 67 when he shot 66, quarter-by-quarter scores not quite adding up right, etc. And when you start relying on phoners for dozens of volleyball kill leaders, well, the scorekeeper might have kept the record wrong or said it wrong over the phone or the low-paid clerk might have typed it in wrong. There are so many chances for inconsequential mistakes on an agate page.

 

The major metro in my area (not LA) uses a full page on prep football and basketball agate. I've seen seven- or eight-page Saturday sections that use two pages on preps, one for agate and another for stories. Makes no sense to me that a paper that big, with as much as they have to cover, uses a quarter of its print space on preps -- especially a whole page on agate. The web was made for agate.

 

Using agate spece to provide more copy from your reporters is good.

However, I must respecfully disagree on the point of reading box scores in the paper. I do that just about every day during the baseball season. It is part of my "getting-ready-for-the-day" ritual.

 

Exactly.

 

When our paper went to AP Limited a few years back, the most complaints came from NASCAR and NFL fans. We switched back to the full sports wire just before the NFL season started. I'm at a small PM'er on the West Coast and, in most cases, have figured that if you don't know the result of that Royals-Mariners thriller by the time we hit your doorstep, you've got trouble.

But I also like to use agate as a weapon. There's no ice surface in our county, so I don't do an NHL roundup until the playoffs, but I do run standings and sums. Do the same with the WNBA. With MLS, just the glance.

 

The agate sections of the two Boston papers contain information that's harder to find in centralized versions elsewhere (they are on their Websites, of course). To wit, prep results and the results of the gazillion small colleges whose alums (like me!) know that's where they can be found. I wonder how many high schools there are in the LAT's circulation area?

 

Agate is one of those things that is simply better online than it is in print. You can customize the results in so many ways.

This is yet another missed opportunity for traditional media -- the question is not whether the information exists; why not help lead readers to it? Try finding agate through your local newspaper's web site. Savvy readers have a system of bookmarks for nba.com, their favorite conference's web site, ESPN, et al.

A local newspaper could do the online equivalent of what Dave Smith did nearly 40 years ago for the Boston Globe in print -- get all the agate together in one place, online, and make it accessible no matter what device the reader is using -- sell that service, and win. Big.

The answer is not, "all the information is out there"; the answer is "all of the information is out there, and we've gathered it for you, made it readable, and made it so you can customize it that you can either quickly get to the information you want and/or read it all in the aggregate, desktop or mobile."

 

Agate is very labor intensive, hence costly, whether collated online or in print.

 

Pre-internet, it was for me too... These days, I don't know how much of a purpose it serves anymore. How many people wait for the paper to look at a box score these days?