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

Making calls could be worse if you got on the phone with someone who wanted to talk for a while. Hated doing the fishing report.

 

The fish report, geezus.
We were a PM. The section was mostly done at night, but a couple of guys came in at 6 a.m. or so to finish it up. The first thing was to retype the Fish Report from the L.A. Times and send it to the backshop to be typeset (this was in the '70s). One time, I just cut it out of the LAT, pasted it to a piece of copy paper and went to send it to the backshop. Sports Editor stopped me. "What are you doing? You can't just cut a story out of another paper. It's unethical." I said, "We're stealing this anyway. How is what I did any more unethical than that?" He laughed and told me to retype it, but admitted that every paper he ever worked for stole the fish report from the LAT. The Fish Report Guy from the LAT should have gotten stringer pay from every paper in SoCal.

 

When I was last on the news side, I was covering communities that relied a bunch on hospitality, tourism, restaurants and so on. I quickly figured out that building permits and victualing licenses were worth checking out at least once a week, especially since the other reporter in town wasn't paying attention to them, since they'd be approved administratively or via the Town Council's consent agenda.

 

Legal Notices are amazingly helpful.

Permits have to be approved for new licenses or buildings. People or businesses file for bankruptcy. Divorces and marriages. Public notices about a city letting a bid for construction, or a university expansion of buildings. It's all there in the fine print that a lot of people ignore.

 

Back in the 19th century, Legal Notices played the same role in newspaper revenue that classified ads did before the Internet in the 20th.

 

Local bowling league standings

 

Lee Gordon is and forever will be the one and only Agatollah.

 

You know how some dartboards have a baseball game on the other side? Well, a group of Durham churches have been playing an organized form of that for over 50 years, with actual home-and-away schedules, win-loss records and individual statistics.

That might be the most obscure agate I've ever had to type in. Dartball League stats. Heaven forbid they ever get left out, literally.

 

Sounds like the devil's in the details for the Dartball League.

An interesting story, though, that surely has been written a few times.

 

Weekend holes-in-one in the Star-Ledger.

 

This thread actually inspired me to try something. I basically built an agate page on our website using Sports-Reference.com embeds that are automatically updated and added an area college/pro scoreboard. We're going to try to set up a QR code on Page 2 of our sports section so print readers, if they want to, can get standings that aren't two days old. Also: They can actually get local standings since what we're able to offer are national and don't have even ACC included. This isn't perfect, and isn't the most beautiful page, but it's worth running a pilot after the great feedback we've gotten about QR codes in our Sunday paper referring folks to digital-only content.

I just wish I could get box scores in here and automate that. Maybe once I'm done learning Python I can write a script. For now, they're in the e-edition.

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/article257170462.html

 

In Clearwater we would just write our own fishing reports
One guy had his dog catch a grouper
At another paper, one guy’s going away party included a mention in the holes in one
Among the witnesses were Jack Meoff and Haywood Jablowme
What I miss is the weekly baseball averages
I preferred team by team but the AL and NL lists were easier to cut
You could fill a lot of agate in the winter with dog and horse tracks