Story length at 10,000 daily?

...

 

Ron Jeremy will show you what he does with 16 inches...



If you have the space to write a longer gamer and you can make it interesting for that long, I see no reason against it. People will read something as long as they are interested. If you stop caring after 16, they'll stop.

 

inches vary among papers, but I'd say for most HS football gamers you should be able to get in and get out in about 500 words

 

Anybody who says stories must ALWAYS be held to a specific length limit is a moron.

 

12 inches is more than enough on the crap-ass level of football that the high schools around Athens play.

And 25 is way too much for the Bobcats.

An your readers and the readers of the Post are two different creatures. Just because they cover the hell out of the Bobcats, doesn't mean that you shouldn't as well.

PS: I'm from there. You're overstating the love for HS sports. . .

 

Wow, I didn't know Tom Metters posts on here.

 

Every now and then, Starman nails it.


And the circ of the paper shouldn't have anything to do with it, either. How much space you have in the section and how important high school sports are to your readers are the things that should determine story length.

 

If your editor tells you no more than 12 inches, well, that's something you're going to have to live with. Mr. Big-Paper Veteran Sportswriter sounds like an idiot.

As a general rule of thumb, I kind of like the one-page-on-Word length on almost any game story. That's about 600-650 words, 17 to 20 inches, enough to get into some detail but not so much that the story bogs down.

But rules are made to be broken. Buster Olney routinely wrote 1,000-word gamers when covering the Yankees, but he was so good as a reporter and writer I wanted to read every word. Some game stories should be 400-500 words.

 

Generally, I'd say 25 is plenty for college gamers and 12 plenty for most high schools.

Hell, I've written many of 8-10 inch football gamers (and frankly those were probably among my best high school game stories. No beating around the bush).

But I wouldn't tell anyone never to write more than 12 inches on a game. I'd suggest you consider it, though. No one wants to read play-by-play.

 

Listen to your gut, not what someone else at a different shop says.

His pub may need more space for college gamers. Yours probably needs more for preps. Not only that, but if any story is well-written enough and engaging enough, inch counts can be meaningless.

He got it wrong, plain and simple.

 

I'm not going to say it's a set-in-stone rule, because it's not.

But most 16-inch high school gamers would probably be better as 12-inch high school gamers.

Sorry.

 

I'm not sure telling young writers to "listen to their gut" is the best advice, either.

Their guts are filled with beer and chili cheese dogs and often don't make the best decisions.