Miami Herald moving out of Doral offices...

I want to borrow my work chair and I am fine with not returning there again, ever

 

I have no idea if it's connected, but we recently CHANGED IT services. New people are MUCH more responsive.

 

I'll see your track and/or field and raise you road races agate, which is the royal flush of shitty agate. And we had to get every name in there b/c the runners sure were going to pick up the paper the next day to see their names.

 

The 100th Boston Marathon in '96 they waived qualifying times. 37,000 starters and damn near 36,000 of 'em finished, some very very late of course. The desk guys were twitchy for weeks after that agate ordeal.

 

Did they do a self-congratulatory "How we did it" blurb like the NYT likes to do?

 

No. They did have quite a night at Foley's, though. And the paper ran promos telling all the out-of-town runners they could see their names in the Herald on newsstand posters and at the bottom of the front page.

 

There's still some newsroom jokes and tales of front page mockups that didn't make it to print that I can't even tell to fellow journalists.

And I'm sure it's b/c I "ran' track, but I always thought track & field was cake to cover. I found it easy to keep track of and by the time the meet was two-thirds complete, it was just a matter of being at the finish line for the final couple track events and then heading to the straggler field events.

This also reminds me of one of the great quotes I ever read from the girls track coach at my HS. My senior year, we won the league meet b/c one of the girls won the last event, the shot put. Asked why she was able to win, the coach said "Because I didn't tell her the league title on the line."

 

This brings back the memory of my time at one paper when there was the annual major road race of our county, which, coincidentally enough, was sponsored by our paper (Side note: Our company always was concerned about conflicts of interest; I liked to point out to certain people that it was a conflict of interest for us to sponsor a road race. I got some annoyed looks for that).

My first year at this paper, I found out that we went all-hands-on-deck for coverage for annual major road race. Practically an entire section in itself, with multiple reporters and photogs. My main assignment was to deal with the agate, which, I was told, was supposed to be much easier than normal because the race organizers had a new computer system, and they were going to send it by email (a rare thing back in those days).

So I get the results, and it's the most gibberish I've ever seen. Places, names, and times are all smushed together with no spaces and a whole bunch of random commas. It took me about four hours, just to put some spacing in, take out the random commas, design the page and try to have it look readable. It frankly wasn't.

Next day, one of the higher-ups complained about the race agate to my SE. Our outdoors writer, who was helping to coordinate the coverage, emailed my SE back to say that it had been a miracle that I was able to make the agate even look as mediocre as it did.

Every year after that, we got the race organizers to come up with a much better and smoother system.

 

I quit shaving in celebration!

 

We had one of those road races in which the editor promised the results would be in the paper the next day. Of course, promises and execution were two different things. This was right at the beginning of the computer era when they canned the linotype operators and hired $5 an hour people to be "inputters" -- typing stories into the computer. The writers didn't do their own back then.
We got this computer printout of the race results, must have been at least an inch thick, but it was done very well, all in columns lined up and it was easy to read (must have been a new ribbon in the printer). The SE brought the editor over and asked how she wanted it done. She had no clue, but she was the boss so she had to come up with something. She wanted the "inputter" to type in all of the results, which meant that when it was done (might have taken a week), it had to be proofread and that was probably going to be me.
The editor put a big X through the columns we didn't need while I'm yelling, wait, wait, wait. I told her this was a good quality printing, just take it to camera, shoot it and put it in the paper. She started whining and said, "But the typeface will be different." I told her that didn't matter, that it would turn a 10-hour job into a 5-minute job. Fortunately, she used a blue pen for her X and it disappeared when it was shot in camera.

 

I was an agate clerk in my first job. Before the interwebs, as a project created by a very well revered member of this board, we ran the full scorecard of every player for all four days of the Players Championship. I was at the course, retreiving cards and calling in to another agate guy, and we dictated each one for four days. Included in the graphic were circles for under par and boxes for over. So the dictation was, "3-4-4" but was "eagle-3, bogey-4, par-4"

 

My same boss who magnificently got all of those 36,000 numbers in and got them right could not, for the life of him, figure out how match and medal play are scored differently for the graphics, which looked great, for the '99 Ryder Cup. The idea that partners or a player would concede a hole and therefore not record a score blew his mind. By Sunday, our increasingly frantic calls of "just put an x in the box" finally took hold. Thank God golf is a daytime sport.