The lost art of the 'gamer'

The notes app with the talk-to-text feature is a lifesaver. I usually have the first half of my story dictated on my phone by the time I get back to the office and it saves a ton of time.

 

Been the norm everywhere I've worked in NorCal. Frosh play Thursday night.

 

With all the obsession of clickbait and all the other little neat ideas from advertising executives running newsrooms, they are clueless why they keep losing money. Let's put the classic gamer, or even the creative gamer aside. People are dumping the product because it increasingly lacks quality journalism. Why's that? Ask your advertising executive running the newsroom.
Consider:
1. They once said stories needed to be shorter. People had less time to read.
2. "Local, local, local!" became the cry. Next step: Cut local resources!
3. Citizen journalist will save us. Citizen journalist can't write and calls coach names on Twitter.
4. "The truth is display advertising is the key."
..and so on.

 

Yeesh. I work in North Carolina (and was also born and raised here) and had no clue that was a thing. And here I thought it was bad that schools play JV and varsity basketball on the same night at the same place.

 

Is there even a way to make play-by-play work well in a gamer? Highlight key plays/moments, sure, but I always cringe when I read gamers with 600 words of meaningless play-by-play.

 

That's the only thing I root for.

It's a 35-point margin where I am. So whenever a team scores to go up 34, I'm the only one in attendance holding my breath as some shaky toe-style kicker lines up for the PAT. I've had coaches go for 2 and make it to reach the margin because they wanted the running clock, too. I probably hugged them.

 

I should say, I root for either a blowout or a thriller.

Of course thrillers are a nut-buster on deadline, but at least you saw an exciting game, likely got better quotes and can generally speed up your story "process" by narrowing almost the entire gamer down to the key sequence of events. No need to describe every TD in a 35-34 finish where the winning score came on 4th-and-goal from the 14 with 8 seconds left. That'll be in the box and scoring summary.

The least ideal are games that aren't big enough routs to get the running clock, so they take forever, but nothing particularly exciting happens and you wind up writing a gamer you get the feeling nobody will read.

 

Yeah, this sucks.

We're not there yet, fortunately. Tweeting occasional updates is asked but not required, and I do manage to do that. But I'm still focused on the stats and writing a good gamer.

So much of the video stuff is just worthless. No context, terrible quality, etc. Not the reporter's fault, but 99 percent of that shit is papers doing it just to do it.

 

This is very true.

I try to tweet a brief summary of every score (if it's like 34-0, then I give it a rest), which helps me remember what happened when I write the gamer. I also have a method of shorthand that makes my notes pretty detailed. My memory is good when I'm writing/tweeting like that, so I can then rip off my gamer pretty quick and still get good detail.

 

I once told a young reporter I believe there are 3 rules for prep gamers:

1. Who won and what was the score?

2. Who made the big play(s) or had the best stats?

3. Why did the game matter? (What does it mean in the standings or postseason picture? Was there recent history between the teams? You know, context.)

Writing about each scoring play is tedious and a boring read, although there are times where tight deadlines dictate you go somewhat toward that route. You still need to be able to describe big plays, too.

 

Somewhere in the middle of this thread, I went back and looked at some of my old stories from, oh, a quarter-century ago.

I never wrote strict play-by-play. But I wrote gamers. A colorless reciting of the play-by-play was never the way to go. It's like everything else; you have to have nuance. There's a place for some play-by-play. And there's a time to use what you're getting paid for, as in common sense and writing ability.

 

People occasionally ask which local teams I root for. I always break out the old sports writer joke:
"Good stories and fast games."