Does any paper still publish an old-time full agate page daily in a digital form?

Local paper runs an agate page which appears to be all national. No HS boxes that I see, not even in Sunday's paper on 3 state high school football championship games involving local teams that were covered on Saturday afternoon. Just a list in Sunday's paper of Friday night high school scores. I went back to the last week of regular season football, nothing in Saturday's paper because deadlines are so early (they do get posted online), just a huge roundup on Sunday with a scorelist, no score by quarters/stats. Really, really sad, but it is a staff down to an SE, 4 full-time writers, a couple of part-time deskers/writers. Coverage of the state's two biggest college FB teams is done by a correspondent because the previous writer got out of the business over the summer and, surprise surprise, wasn't replaced.

 

We did linescores for high school baseball. I put a lot in besides WP, LP, Sv, 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, LOB. I put in BG -- the name of the batgirl who was a friend of mine.

One place we started putting in mugs to break up type in the baseball boxes -- like "Piazza 2 homers." One guy started using negative mugs -- "Palmeiro 3 strikeouts." The same guy eventually got a job at the Hartford Courant because he used a mug of an obscure Red Sox player who nobody ever heard of in SoCal. Hartford SE was impressed.

My first job, Amy Alcott was a local. When the agate page got tight, we were instructed to find her in the LPGA results and cut it off under her name. The golf columnist wrote about her a lot. He got a letter from a reader, who asked, "Why do you keep writing about Amy Alcott all the time when she comes in last place in every tournament?"

Anybody remember the Camel scoreboard?

 

Remember when you’d come up on an early deadline or a dead spot in the year and had to get creative with agate filler? BOX -- FightSked was my friend many a night. And if you were hopelessly stumped in winter, there was always the ski report. I’m sure our subscribers in South Georgia appreciated that valuable resource we provided on occasion.

 

Ski report was great when you needed to fill 50 inches in 8 seconds.

 

“BBO-ThisDateInHistory” was a good friend of mine.

 

I would love it if my local paper would run full agate in the e-edition. It's such a great way to stay abreast of multiple leagues and has actually helped me notice a thing or two on my own beat.

 

My second to last journalism stop - The Newport Daily News - was still running transactions, box scores and some other stuff as of early 2018, when I got laid off. Of course, I believe they were down to a single part-time sports reporter, and a digital editor who used to be on the sports side, by that point. So most days, there would only be one or two locally produced sports pieces, and the rest was wire. It was also a Gatehouse paper with early deadlines, so you got to read about the Monday Red Sox game in the Wednesday edition. (IIRC - There was back and forth at the time about whether they were going to keep doing that, and they may have transitioned away from it.) If you subscribed to the paper, you had access to a pretty decent, clickable PDF every morning, which included the agate.

 

The paper I work for has an agate page. We don't put it together; it comes already built from a contractor.

 

At my first paper, we placed into the transactions our editor's favorite NFL team announcing the birth of his first child. I had nothing to do with it but I'm still super proud of being even tangentially associated with it.

 

We only put in full box scores for games we actually cover, along with a list of scoring plays and the final score for football roundups.
Just don't have the time (earlier deadlines) and manpower (down to a sports editor, a part-timer and a couple freelancers).

 

As much as I kinda dug the grunt work of putting out agate, one paper had a genius guy who worked part online and part in sports who developed scripts for every imaginable piece of agate: NFL standings, college football standings, TV schedule, NASCAR results, AP Top 25, college baseball scores. Seriously, he built everything. You had the wire part of the agate page done in five minutes.

 

Yeah the wire stuff never took long. Hit one button to format and paste it into quark.

The part I took the most pride in were the TV/radio listings. I wanted something I would actually refer to find everything that was on, which meant going above and beyond what AP sent over. In one market we got duplicate affiliates for the Big 3 networks (which rocked for NFL Sundays), so I would comb the web to verify which station got which regional broadcast and plug it in.