Pre-packaged agate

[jr/shotglass]

Anybody use pre-packaged agate, dealt with it in the past, considering dealing with it now?

What are some of the opinions?

From what you've seen, can local be integrated smoothly with national?

 

[Colton]

We've had the MLB and NFL since it started and had the NBA until it was scratched.

With the slashing and gashing of staff, it's been a godsend.

Never had a problem with packaging, deadline or customer service.

Thumbs up, in my humble opinion.

 

[HanSenSE]

For baseball, It was a lifesaver and timesaver when I was a one-man band. Just left a hole for it, downloaded it at a certain time every night and built the baseball roundup around it. At least with the company we dealt with, they'd even put in the late games from the night before. We didn't subscribe to the NFL package, since the only day we needed to worry about agate was for Monday's paper.

 

[Precious Roy]

We have both MLB and NFL and we love having it. After having to build agate pages by myself at my previous post, coming here to a world of click and drag entire packages was like the sky opening up and hearing the angels sing. We are able to just package with capsules around it or use local baseball stories we have with whatever space we have that day. It's great for Sunday's when I have to work desk myself when it's my turn, just a time saver all around.

 

[nietsroob17]

We have the baseball package from the CanWest service. Leaves us space on one side to do roundups on each league and below to place the jump from our local MLB team's gamer (or stretch the boxes out if need-be).

 

[cwilson3]

We have a full MLB agate page and a half page of agate covering everything else. It's basically freed up seven shifts a week for us. A very good thing.

 

[JRoyal]

Used the MLB from AP at my old shop and it was pretty nice.

 

[Mark2010]

What companies provide this?

 

[SavebyKeans]

We're a Gannett site and we use an MLB page sent by USA Today. While it does save loads on labor, it does have its problems, especially since we're in an MLB market. For instance, the USAT folks decide on which late boxes to run for which edition. So if our club is on the West Coast, we usually have to run their late boxes on our agate page for all editions two days later. Readers have really picked up on this problem and do not like it. Long story short, if you're going this route try to have as much input as possible on the content you receive.

 

[baddecision]

Keans, why can't your desk just work up the boxes that are affected by this and put them on a live page, maybe with a refer on the prefab page... Weakened packaging is better than weakened content, right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, as I've not worked in a shop with prefab agate packages, but I've been a makeup editor / rim guy / slot guy at a biggish shop and we did that when necessary. Do you get the pages as non-editable PDFs or are they InDesign or Quark pages that you can update?

 

[jr/shotglass]

It may be easier than I'm thinking, but the idea of formatting baseball boxes on InDesign or Quark would give me nightmares.

 

[Mark2010]

It may be easier than I'm thinking, but the idea of formatting baseball boxes on InDesign or Quark would give me nightmares.

Done both and was never a big problem. Mainly just using style sheets.

 

[SavebyKeans]

Keans, why can't your desk just work up the boxes that are affected by this and put them on a live page, maybe with a refer on the prefab page... Weakened packaging is better than weakened content, right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, as I've not worked in a shop with prefab agate packages, but I've been a makeup editor / rim guy / slot guy at a biggish shop and we did that when necessary. Do you get the pages as non-editable PDFs or are they InDesign or Quark pages that you can update?

We get them as pre-packaged PDFs that are not editable. The main challenge with a bare bones universal desk is having somebody who is already juggling 20 jobs take the time to see which boxes have been pulled off and which have not.

 

[baddecision]

Sorry to hear that Keans. I don't have an answer for that. There's technically a way to edit text in PDFs but it means deconstructing and reconstructing it, pretty much impossible in the case of an agate page. Maybe you could ask the people at USAT if they also can make the page available as an InDesign file.

@Mark: Lots of deskers fear the "nightmare" of coming up with a set of actions/style sheets to automate agate processing. Think about it: The time you invest in it -- even if it's 50 hours -- will pay itself back in just a few weeks of time savings. And after you learn the basics by figuring out, say, MLB box processing, it'll be easier to do the NBA, NCAA, NFL, etc., stuff in the fall. That will compound the savings. And the time you save is deadline time, the most precious. What would you do with an extra 45 minutes on deadline each night? How about gussy up your section front to better attract the interest of bigger shops? Or, at least, feel a little like you're rising above the nightly grind. Win-win...

 

[jr/shotglass]

We were one of the first newspapers to institute agate "user-definable keys," back on the SII system some 15-18 years ago. And we now have a macro "board" in our Harris system, where we automate the cleanup of any sort of tabbable wire agate.

It makes for a better agate page -- AP's manual justification on its agate just doesn't get things lined up -- and it saves time. I can't imagine not doing it.

 

[Johnny Dangerously]

Ah, SII. That brings back memories.

 

[baddecision]

The good old days of Harris and XyWrite... I wrote most of the pagination formatting code for two papers' Harris systems, then learned XyWrite DOS word-processor programming language so that we could process all our AP sports and election agate with about 3 keystrokes. The boss estimated the XyWrite time savings at 14-16 hours per week, year-round. Those were the days, when I actually felt like I knew something about how to put the paper out.

 

[HanSenSE]

Keans, why can't your desk just work up the boxes that are affected by this and put them on a live page, maybe with a refer on the prefab page... Weakened packaging is better than weakened content, right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, as I've not worked in a shop with prefab agate packages, but I've been a makeup editor / rim guy / slot guy at a biggish shop and we did that when necessary. Do you get the pages as non-editable PDFs or are they InDesign or Quark pages that you can update?

We get them as pre-packaged PDFs that are not editable. The main challenge with a bare bones universal desk is having somebody who is already juggling 20 jobs take the time to see which boxes have been pulled off and which have not.

One of the features of the boxes from CanWest was they'd keep the boxes on fo 24 hours or so. I recall one time when they had the standings wrong and I was hesitant to fix them, for fear of throwing off all the tabs. They found the error, fixed it and reshipped it.

 

[brutab]

Hi
Have a look at Soho Sports, they are now licencing AP and local content.

 

[jr/shotglass]

That's what we're looking at.