Earlier Deadlines screws sport coverage

Two more stories and a questions from my side.
1) Sunday night MBB road game at Saint Louis. I had WBB home game day before so I stayed behind. 7 pm tipoff. Thanks my counterpart, I had game art, box scores and quotes on our site at 10:30. Just sayin

2) My AD offered to proofread and I take advantage at every opportunity.

3) I gotta know what you think about this. Holyfield's son was in town Saturday night fighting on a Christy Martin promoted card. He was there also. Local shop completely whiffed. AP passed. Now I know there were cars on the track and AP is AP, but come on,.man....it's Holyfield.

 

We're far from a major paper, but our print deadline is 8 p.m., and we don't print on Sunday or Monday. We do hold until midnight on Friday during football season. The rest of the year we go from Friday evening until Monday evening without putting out a print edition.
Combined with a bit of pressure from a start-up web site in town (a whole other story and lengthy rant) it's almost turned our web site and print edition into two separate products. If there's anything of note that happens over the weekend, it goes online ASAP and in the Tuesday print edition. Sometimes it doesn't get into print at all, if it's outdated by then. There are also things that go in print that don't lend themselves to the web.

 

It’s not Holyfield. It’s his son.

 

In other news, water is wet and the Sun is set to rise in the east tomorrow.

rb

 

His son won by KO in 82 seconds. Back in the day, this was worth a stringer.

 

It's 2020. I mean, I'm not sure what you're looking for here - Unless you work for The Athletic, it probably fucking sucks right now for you as compared to X years ago in any reporting job. I'm not sure what the bottom is yet for journalism and sports journalism economics, but we're probably not even there yet.

 

Many boomers I know get the print product for the features section — crosswords, Dear Ann/Dear Abby, etc..., and dropping those items will result in canceled subscriptions. If the goal is to end all print within the decade, why go to the effort of consolidating printing plants and trucking papers a 100 miles to the local market? Plug the plug now.

 

Don't know the situation in your neck of the woods, but I know a lot of papers have earlier deadlines on Sundays because of smaller staffs. Even if they send to print at the same time as they do during the week, sports might get shuffled out early on a non-football Sunday.

 

I agree! I think they are reluctant to pull the plug because as I said, the print product is still profitable because of the boomers. I think the suits have decided that it's not hurting anybody to continue producing a paper. They just slowly but surely are saving tons of money by getting rid of popular features little by little. And popular writers little by little. Every few months axe a veteran reporter or two and get rid of comics this time, Dear Abby next time.
We'll get there eventually but if a majority of boomers live til 95-100 the print product might still be around a while. Probably 3-4 days a week should be enough for the boomers to keep subscribing.

 

All i know is I've gone from bitching about not having my games covered from not having my recaps published within 24 hours in just a couple of years. Screw the local shop -- we can and are doing a better job.

 

When our paper moved its deadline up an hour 6 years ago due to outsourcing the printing 90 miles away, we were told we would shift to an "online-first" publication. Except we don't put stories online until after deadline and they don't even go public until after we send the paper to press, which is no different than how the process was before we outsourced the printing. So really nothing changed except for the earlier deadline. It's an 11 pm deadline so we still get most stuff in, but it doesn't allow for much creative process beyond writing stories and putting them on the pages. Oh, and social doesn't usually get updated until the next day. Or, sometimes Friday events in Saturday paper don't go on social until Sunday since we don't have a Sunday paper.

 

Our paper made a similar moves years ago. At first I was concerned, but really in the digital age, you decide what your deadline is. Think of yourself as an online news source for the community and promote it that way. If you choose, you can get game stories up the same night/next morning. Consider the print edition a souvenir for proud parents to grab when it happens to come out in that form.