For $40.....

I'm amazed at how much double-dipping goes on now, even between competing papers. Writer writers for Paper A, does 450-500 words, ships it, then rewrites Paper B, with a new lede, a few other changes and maybe a couple different quotes. That never would have flown back in the day.

Speaking of the day, I just (thankfully) missed out on the couplers era, but did get the joy of the TRS80, which at the time seemed very high-tech (there's one being used in the plane in a late scene in Midnight Run, which made it very legit to me). And then eventually I had to deal with searching for a Panera Bread, which were for a while the only places with free wireless. And you had to hope they still had the modem on.

 

At the bottom of a pond just off the 18th green at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., there lies one of those "advanced" direct-connect thingamabobs that came after the acoustic couplers. It shorted out my TRS-80 as I was putting the finishing touches on a 30- or 40-inch monster* for a special Sunday PGA Championship spread. Watching that sonofabitch slip quietly beneath the surface ... after I'd rewritten and then dictated the piece to the desk ... remains one of the more pleasurable moments of my sportswriting career.


*And, yes, it was monstrous in more ways than its size.

 

I kind of wonder how many of them are "true" competitors. Like in Rhode Island, I think there is one town that has multiple competing print outlets at this point, and even that place (Newport), it's five days a week vs. a weekly that doesn't really cover sports.

 

You may be surprised how much double-dipping has always gone on. I am mildly ashamed to admit when I first started I several times covered the same event for two different outlets. One difference may be that I was stringing or part-timing for each and not an official employee of either. One was local to where I was and the other was statewide. So one had a local angle and the other a wider scope.

I was also young and dumb, kind of similar to Small Town's experience, and sort of didn't know any better. After one game where I did this, a friend of mine who was and still amazingly enough in the biz, looked at both and said, what is the difference between these two? More or less implying, how do you get away with this? After that I think I probably changed the stories up more, but still double-dipped on occasion. That was like 25 years ago.

I wouldn't do it now, or at least would tell both I was, but it certainly happened. I couldn't have been the only one doing it!

 

I also worked a popular national event once a few years later and had several papers that had teams there that I covered. There was definitely some crossover there, but I was more experienced then and with the nature of the beast definitely had to tailor each story, even if it was the same game or whatever, to the paper I was writing it for. So they were not the same in any way.

 

I was the anti-double dipper. I’d write up a story for the daily paper I worked for and then have to rework the lede and quotes for Podunk County because we also owned the weekly there.

 

I think there is also the fact that if it helps your product to have more local, you have to play that game with the lack of staff / stringers available. If it means having an extra story or two it's not that bad.

 

I double dipped for my daily and a nearby weekly, where I worked previously. I was not a sports reporter but would cover football and the SE would assign me to games I could do for both. Like others, there would be a fresh lead and local quotes, but the guts and play-by-play would be the same in both.

 

Side note - Petition to change topic title to "For Forty Dollars More..." in keeping with SJ tradition of references that the kids love.

 

I could not possibly have happened to me. The TRS80s that I worked with would only hold about 18 inches of copy. I would’ve had to send that story in three takes. At an NFL or MLB game you would have to send your notebook before you could even start your gamer.

 

Interesting. We never ran into that ... they were slow (and unreliable) as shit, but they'd hold plenty of copy.