Dear dimwit on the phone

Had someone call up the other day, likely this one soccer player's parent, asking very long-windedly about who the top goal scorers in the state were (knowing full well his daughter, who is going to be our player of the year, is among them).
This was at 10:15 Saturday night.
REALLY!?
This assclown has nothing better to do with his life at that point than to call the newspaper to ask a question, and try to engage in a debate, about high school soccer!?
It would've just been a randomly forgettable pesky parent call normally, but 10:15 ON A SATURDAY NIGHT!?
Good God.

 

Not possible. Soccer has held that title for 40 years running, and you can pry it out of its cold, dead, Capri Sun stained fingers.

 

Got the first "Why don't you run all the baseball box scores" e-mail today, right on time.

 

Did you tell them "we will when they give us an extra page"?

 

It does beg the question: "Why bother to publish a paper if you're going to put all the news on Twitter 12 hours before the paper hits the stands?"

As a reader, part of the fun of picking up a paper was finding out stuff you didn't know before: who won a game, who was getting hired/fired, whatever? I wonder if the industry has lost all of that.

 

My response is a bit more nuanced, but yeah - We need to close that page by 10, which means few night games are over; and we have six staff writers competing for real estate and I intend to keep them employed.

 

Not unique. I know this topic has come up before. With newsholes getting smaller and smaller, especially at mid-sized papers, it's harder to justify giving an entire page to Major League Baseball every day for six months.

 

I wish we could ditch the whole MLB page.

~Signed,
Slot man that just did his whole 5 page-shift without a true rimmer or someone else to do the baseball page.

 

yeah, I agree. The problem is it's every freakin' day for six months. I can live with an NFL page (or even two) on Mondays for four months, because there isn't much locally happening in sports on Sundays in most small and mid-sized markets. As for baseball, I'd rather run real stories and features and readable stuff than 15 boxscores.

And, yeah, Spike, I've done five pages or more solo quite a few times. Being in the western time zones did help a bit.

 

I don't think so at all. Sure, breaking news is everywhere, so you might know that Florida beat Kentucky, but you won't know how it happened or that Florida had won 28 straight games or whatever from Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Sure, you could read the story online (for free), but I still think the printed paper is the best way to organize and present the news. I read dozens of things in the paper every day that I would not have known or might have missed if I was reading on the website. Websites are getting better, but most of them are still a pain in the ass to navigate. And the paper allows me to read stuff I didn't know I wanted to read until I saw it.

 

We are on the second year of MLB lite - standings and schedules, a lead and roundup and "featured box scores" on the two biggest teams to our readership, the Cardinals and Braves. It all packs neatly into a vertical half page.

It's a little bit of work, but not too much. Reader reaction? Muted.
And this is crucial from my POV - in a four-page section, it opens up space for perhaps three more staff-written stories.
I have six writers I'm trying to keep employed.

 

Still doing a full page of baseball here, but we have an MLB team and several that train in the area in the spring. We did scale back quite a bit on spring boxes, but our MLB coverage is the same. Definitely put a strain on the limted editing staff we have these days, but doesn't cut into space we need for other things most of the time.