The National Sports Daily

The story I've heard from a couple people who worked there was that the biggest problem was getting The National on the presses.

That, and Deford threw money around like it would never run out...

I read it every day and still have saved many of them.

 

I will always keep that clip.

 

As an editorial product, The National would have survived. We needed changes, we'd have made them.

As a business product, it had no chance because it was rushed into existence with no real plan. What the rush was, I still have no idea. But USA Today, to name another national newspaper, was in its planning stages twice as long as The National existed from conception to closing. Before we started, the publisher, Peter Price, told me the business plan was to make money on single-copy sales; beyond that, no plan, none. Production was flawed from the start and got worse; if it rained in Detroit, transmissions of pages was impossible. We never had a delivery system of our own; because we piggy-packed on Dow Jones, we became slaves not only to its delivery routes but to its early deadlines; no sports newspaper is going to long survive without night-game scores, and, worse, readers couldn't count on findiing the paper at the same place every day. When it became apparent that the investment necessary to rescue the enterprise might be twice that already spent, it was over.

 

I do know that in its too-short existence, it never reached the point where it was easy to get my hands on a copy. Because, believe me, I tried. Daily.

ESPN.com was mentioned. I like to think I'm fairly Internet-savvy. But I still don't think I could get a package on an event as well-planned, as complete, on the Web site as I could in The National.

Perhaps some smart Web-based editor (I can think of one right now ) could incorporate some of The National's ideas for presenting agate and supplemental material into their product.

 

I was a subscriber and I still had to go the the local 7-11 to pick it up...

 

Bad economy. Poor budgeting. Bad distribution. Rolling it out slowly made no sense. It never really was national. They were paying a fortune to compose the product, but only a handful of markets got it. A great idea badly executed from a business standpoint.

 

I saw a lot of good talent going there at the same time I was looking for a job, but for two reasons I was content to profit from all the openings The National created at major metros.

I didn't think it would last very long. One of my colleagues left for The National and told us that a car service provided rides home if you worked past a certain hour. It was excesses like this that made me believe people were living in a dream world.

Also, I liked being part of a complete newspaper, even though as a sports person it can be limiting. But those limitations, while sometimes frustrating, also are part of the challenge each day. I kind of like being given a stack of dummies, in which I know we likely got screwed on the space request, and breaking it down so we can still give the big stuff its due and yet get in all the other stuff, or at least most of it. It's like a Rubik's Cube; you feel like you accomplished something that not everyone can.

I heard a story about an old SE, a legend in the business, sitting at APSE and listening to peers from some large papers complain about space cutbacks. He said this is ridiculous -- if they gave us everything we asked for, anyone could do the job, that the challenge is doing great work with not-so-great resources. I really have to agree. In the mid-1990s I worked on a section where the writers filed really clean copy, the bad ones were the rare exceptions. I was so freaking bored. I do not want Utopia.

 

I'd like something closer to utopia than what we try to cram into diminished space each day. Sure, we refer to stories on the Web and file Internet-only copy, but the totality is missing.

 

I remember having to go to a machine and put in my quarters ... I think it was 50 cents then went to 75 cents. Lemme tell ya, it's easier to cobble together 50 cents than 75 (at least when you are just out of college).

Great paper, though. Unlike many local papers in which you can get through in 5 minutes, there were plenty of good columnists to read. I think Norman Chad (way back when I liked him) did a TV column which I enjoyed.

 

You betcha. Great TV column.

 

I was in the middle of things happening in L.A. back then and what I remember is a bunch of DeFord/National ego-maniacs all over the place, and the PR/SIDs bending over backward to accommodate them.
Tom Friend literally -- rudely -- broke into a one-on-one interview I was having with an LMU basketball player after Hank Gathers died, interrupting him in mid-quote to ask another question. After we were done, I got him aside and calmly told him that I didn't care where he worked, if he ever did that again, I'd kick his ass (and I've never been in a fight in my life).
At the West Regional in Oakland, the National writers all got courtside seats, we were in the stands even though we covered LMU as a regular, daily beat. My boss got the Cal SID aside and asked about the seating arrangements. He was told that they got courtside because they were national media. My boss calmly said, "What's their circulation, 60,000? We're 135,000."
Really, I wanted the National to be good. I had friends working for it -- Lyle Spencer, Ken Gurnick. But when I started getting it, I'd see their fancy scorebook-style baseball boxes, but the color was so out of register that some of the symbols were in the gutter or out on the edge of the page. It just wasn't very good and very unreliable.

 

Competition makes everybody better.

The National made USA Today much better ... and USAT lost its way for a while after The National folded.

But there was a fundamental disconnect at the heart of the paper, as artfully done as it often was.

Did it want to be Sports Illustrated every day, or did it want to be the sports newspaper of record?

It tried to navigate down the middle, somehow, without ever reconciling the answer to that question.