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The end of call-takers?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by HejiraHenry, Jan 10, 2009.

  1. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    You have to cut it off somewhere.I've had coaches call me AFTER press deadline (usually 11:30, sometimes 11 on Saturdays) with a 7:30 game because they waited until after a 3-hour bus ride home to call. I had to tell them I'd only run agate on a second-day basis.
     
  2. trench

    trench Member

    In my final days as prep czar at a 150k circ shop with 50-plus HS in the area and not near enough people to handle the call load, I tried to convince SE to run scores only in print and boxscores only online, with a policy of scores by phone only and boxscores by email only. Hated to push for less in the paper but when you've got more calls on hold than you have on the phone and desk guys are the ones juggling the order of who has waited longest while they're trying to get the product out on deadline, it's about in-house logistics too. In the end, SE was too attached to boxscores in print. I told him I needed to make big changes to prep coverage (beyond just agate policy) due to shrinking resources. He wanted the same square peg in the same round hole. Two months later, he's looking for a new prep boss. Should have left 5 years sooner.
     
  3. Pendleton

    Pendleton Member

    I have been waiting for this kind of solution since 1999. I've stopped holding my breath. ... One problem is that there are 100 different kinds of front-end systems of producing the print edition, and not many of them are very good when it comes to reverse-publishing, especially when it comes to something with tricky formatting, like agate.
     
  4. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Yes, sir, you identified the primary problem. If you have a print system in which non-alphanumeric symbols are used in copy, you've got to find a way to replicate them on the Internet end.
     
  5. BillyT

    BillyT Active Member

    Yep, and things change.

    I remember say 20 years ago, that we couldn't use @ because it was a signal to the computer to format the byline.

    "BillyT@The Westerly wind@#WEQUETEQUOCK"would give you your byline the under line for the byline, the returns, the indent and the dateline.

    Now, of course, the @ is not reserved for that. I do remember typing (at) in the early days of the Internet.

    Then there are backslashes . . .
     
  6. Pendleton

    Pendleton Member

    Sure, things change. But they're changing too slowly while we drown.

    We identified 8-10 years ago the immediate need to find a way to use the Internet to our advantage when it came to taking local sports boxscores on deadline and reverse-publishing it in the newspaper on the same deadline.

    But very few newspapers have solved this problem and everyone who HAS solved it has done so with some sort of makeshift technological solution that applies only to that newsroom and isn't transferrable anywhere else.

    That's one reason (of many) why outfits like SportsHuddle failed. They needed to reinvent the wheel to find a workable process for every single newsroom they contracted with, and they didn't have the time to do that sufficiently.
     
  7. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Somehow, someway, Harris got ahead of the curve on this stuff. All their typesetting commands can also be represented with an angle-bracket command, such as <ql> for quad-left, <fm> for format-merge (the universal @ command), <ep> for end-paragraph.

    That makes it possible not only to turn out print-ready material off an Internet template, you can also do a lot of good stuff with search-and-replace macros.
     
  8. Big Buckin' agate_monkey

    Big Buckin' agate_monkey Active Member

    Plz stop. Make it go away.
     
  9. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Think about a seven-team dual, man.

    1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 1-6, 1-7, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 2-6, 2-7, 3-4, 3-5, 3-6, 3-7, 4-5, 4-6, 4-7, 5-6, 5-7, 6-7.

    Pant-pant-pant.
     
  10. SoCalScribe

    SoCalScribe Member

    I'm pretty sure that call-takers will be among the last positions eliminated at any newspaper that prints prep boxes. I don't care if you haven't answered phones since 1976, you never forget what it's like and just how clueless the coaches/statgirls calling boxes in can be. An internet-only system won't encourage more people to submit things online...it will lead the few coaches who DO submit things online to stop doing so because no one else submits their boxes anymore.
     
  11. spnited

    spnited Active Member

    Gotta love it shottie.
    Saturday we had seven quads (that's 6 sums each) and six tri-meets (3 sums each) All were faxed of e-mailed. Clerks were getting exhausted typing in 60 sums into our template.
     
  12. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Something to note here, too.

    We were getting low on phoners, what with kids leaving for college and all. So our new SE posts an ad for it in the sports section on two days.

    He gets 31 replies. So they're out there.
     
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