What Makes This Piece Good, Vol. 4: Selena Roberts' gamer on Knicks/Heat

I don't know what the solution is.
I have seen some of the analytics in the past and our gamers generated almost squat (big daily).
Cost effectiveness = less effective and more expensive, especially if you're sending average writers on the road to file gamers on a regular basis.
Back in the day, I could read a football gamer and felt confident I could tell not so much how well someone knew football, but how well somebody knew how to watch a football game.
And how quickly the person could sort through its disparate parts, in a race against the clock.
In the vein of the old classic How to Read a Book.

http://classicalbookworm.wordpress.com/2006/07/29/how-to-read-a-book-by-mortimer-j-adler-and-charles-van-doren/

 

I don't want to be doom and gloom, but when you fire up the Ipad in the morning, how many people go to the gamer on MLB.com and how many go to the highlights?

 

How much time did Selena have to write that?

 

I know the answer to Xan's question will somehow make people think less of the story, but the game was a 3 pm tip. But I seriously doubt the Times was holding pages up for very long for a Knicks gamer, especially in the Howell Raines era. Yeah, there is a higher degree of difficulty in writing 8 pm gamers. But for the most part, at any big paper, you don't get to sit there and stare at the laptop for an hour before you start writing.

Anyway, we'll get to the playoff baseball gamer that changes in the last inning in future editions, something I think is one of the hardest jobs in sports writing.

 

Nah. Knowing she had 5 hours or so to write it has zero bearing on what I think of it. For all we know she banged it out in 90 minutes. Was just curious.

Fifteen years ago was just such a different time and place in the journalism game.

She spun the story nicely.

 

There is literally zero chance she was afforded five hours to write that. Not at the Times. But yeah, different era.

 

It's not slighting the story at all. But more pointing to maybe having 15 minutes to rework some sentences or graphs might not be there today. I doubt 99 percent of writers could write something that well if given five days. I was just thinking about how times have changed.

 

Times and means change, talent usually does not.

 

Indeed but how does one's opinion change knowing whether she spun it in 54 minutes or 2 hrs and 37 minutes?

 

Well, to me exceeding the deadline is like violating the shot clock. It's almost like it shouldn't count if it goes over.
I had a Marine father who drilled punctuality, with hell to pay if you were late.
Fart was raised with an internal clock.
Meeting deadline was never going to be an issue.

 

It shouldn't matter. If the gamer was in SI, and they had a full day to write it, that might change my opinion.

What stands out to me, aside from the incredible writing, is that it feels like the entire story was written after the game was over. So often, even with earlier games, the bulk of the story is written during the game. Sometimes you have to do this, covering a MNF game that has to be filed the second it's over, but a lot of writers do the same thing even when they don't have to and you can see the difference in the gamer.

 

Gammons gets eternal love for his gamer after the Fisk homer because he filed it in minutes. Fisk hit his homer at 12:34 a.m.

I don't know how long it took Selena to write this gamer but let's just use the aforementioned parameters of 54 minutes and 2 hours and 37 minutes because if it's an afternoon game you probably should spend an hour on it. But let's take it closer to the other side of the timeframe.

Don't you think having that extra 100 minutes helps out greatly because it takes the edge off of having to file NOW NOW NOW!!?

Another technical question: Did she write a quick gamer for an early edition, and was this finished piece for the late edition?

If we're asking WHY the writing is fantastic, it seems fair to ask how long it took to make it fantastic.