Cowboys reporter out here spiking footballs of her own.

I didn't come from money. I suppose my targets were set low: I just want to be able to pay my bills and take a trip every once in a while, while having good friends. That's all I need. It's been to my detriment, sure, but I'm ok with being an "underachiever."

 

Years ago at a former job there was a printed out sign on a copier advising something or other with an added notation in tiny type: "Don't kern this sign, Eddie".

I still don't know what that was about.

 

Sort of tangential, I suppose, but you can always tell the former preps writers in press boxes these days. They never came from money or had golden spoons in their mouths and they're the older ones still grinding at this dumbass profession (myself certainly included). There aren't any young former prep writers anymore.

 

Talk of kerning gives me PTSD. Had a former sports editor who when trying to shoehorn a story to fit the space, instead of searching out and kerning grafs that had a single word or two on the last line, would highlight the entire story, then do the knucklebuster+< and kern the entire damn thing until it fit.

He got into a near-shouting match with a caller who complained about a couple of grafs in one story being almost impossible to read because it was smashed together so tight.

 

I lived the job 24/7 for 23 years. Wouldn't change a thing.

Also missed a lot.

Also wouldn't trade it for the world.

Got out at the right time.

Not the same profession.

 

I remember sports editors who would do that with MLB box scores, schedules and other stuff on the agate page. They would hit command-A and squeeze everything down to -80 or whatever it took to save a line or two. It made the Scoreboard page unreadable.

I’d do the page and (gasp!) cut out a meaningless transaction or two. Or the names of umpires. Nobody but the sports editors ever noticed.

 

Way to cost a scholarship for the player released from Single-A Bumfuck or the fill-in third base umpire, ASSHOLE!!!!!

 

I know all the Quark and InDesign tricks and used them back in the day: kerning, type size, and proportion. You could go between 97% and 103% and not detect a big difference while flushing hed decks.

 

The perverting of heds and kerning and the like, on deadline, was one of the great joys.

As was the 2-minute warning of agate dumping (if you hadn't set the page up early in the shift).

 

I'm a former preps writer who is still pretty young. But I'm an anomaly.

And I think that goes back to the beginning of this thread. When I was coming up even just a decade ago, there were a ton of reporters who showed me the ropes and how to act in and out of the newsroom. With newsrooms getting younger and losing more resources, people are getting thrown into jobs without having any idea of how to operate inside of them. And so we see reporters publicly feeling things out and learning what they should and shouldn't do.

 

Speaking of learning, in the bad old days we'd write a gross of high school game capsules on a busy night. One guy (NOT me) tested whether anyone (including editors) actually read them, ending a baseball write-up with "and that was the whole can of corn."

It got zero reaction from readers or edit staff.

 

Great (and funny) way to end it. Kudos to him. Did he ever go on to bigger and better things?