Deadline issues

I hate coach Butthole. He's a cliche machine.

 

Yeah, but Player X is awesome. He always gives the juiciest quotes.

 

One minor thing: lose the Red Bull. It doesn't help, it probably hinders.
It probably makes you more hyper than you already are about making deadline, making it more difficult for you to organize your thoughts and your story.

 

One thing I do even though I have several days to write the story on some occasions: I go in with a mental idea of how I want the story to go from ledes to questions leading to quotes, etc. That usually develops over the course of a game.

It's better to go into writing with an outline of some kind, whether that outline appears on the written page or remains lodged in your head.

 

This may sound lazy, but you can almost follow a template for gamers when time is a factor. It's surprisingly effective. Don't try to turn every gamer into a Grantland Rice-like epic, some battle between good and evil. Just tell what happened.

Start with a key to game (that wicked awesome Player X scoring 35 points, for example), add a little detail about it and pop in a quote. Mention some stats, maybe a trend, and throw in another quote. All of a sudden, you've got five or six inches of copy without breaking a sweat.
Then find the key to the game. In basketball, it might be that 10-0 run midway through the third quarter. In baseball, a five-run inning and the way one team's pitching struggled. Talk about it, throw in another quote or two, and voila, you've got a respectable 12-15 inch gamer filed.

 

I was going to type something along those lines. The tighter your deadline is, the simpler you should probably keep your copy. It's easier to bust out some nuts and bolts of the game and key stats than to write poetry when the desk needs your story ASAP. The later your game, the less likely people will know the results anyways the next morning. AP copy isn't the most interesting to read, but they keep things simple because they know papers need that copy ASAP.

 

Whoever said preparation is right. Are there any trends regarding the teams? What are the implications of the game?

Figure those out before you ge to the game and knock them into your laptop. Write a few graphs for either outcome. That will be one less thing to worry about on deadline.

 

Exactly. One of the most frustrating things to do when I work desk is to try and turn some poorly-written dreck from a press release or school web site into something readable. Too many folks (I assume they're mostly students) try to get cute. Next thing you know, you're 10 paragraphs into the story and you know what the score was at the 5-minute mark of the first quarter, but not the final score.
There's nothing wrong with the AP formula. It might be boring, but it works. Save the fancy stuff for
a) When you have time
b) Feature stories that deserve it
c) When you actually have some good material to work with. If you have a good idea and you know where to go with it, go for it. Otherwise, if you're tight on time and don't have a great plan, just pound the damn thing out and move on. You can always write a featurish second-day story if something interesting happened.

 

preparation, keep it fairly simple and analyze the game as it moves along. Usually i write the story in my head while driving home, sans quotes, although I know where I want those. then, when you sit down, you just start typing and add in the details.

10 minutes later you have a 15-inch story that is good quality, easy to read and follow and gives the basics of the game. don't overthink shit and try to get cute.

 

8-ball? That works for me.

 

Good point, spirited.
My paper had to tell our cops reporter - a young kid, around 20 - that he's not allowed to drink red bulls at work anymore because he gets so hyper, combined with his ADD, that he can't work.

 

I know I don't need a Red Bull to get motivated to write quickly. It's all about getting in on time or you don't have a job. With a wife and three kids, that's the motivation I have.