Gannett's new high school sports sites -- and robotic story writing?

Wow. Two people with the same name..

 

Good people, can we all agree on one thing? Gannett is the most disgraceful company in the history of humankind? Anybody who works at a Gannett rag has my deepest sympathies. Is there anybody out there that can argue that this company is the definition of trash? My gosh.

 

I, for one, welcome our alien overlords.

 

By this time tomorrow, with the first night of high school football, that story would be better than some of the stringer copy I'll see.

 

Enron says Gannett needs to get in line.

 

And in front of Enron is a horde of 19th century/early 20th century coal mining companies, railroad companies, not to mention in front of the line: Pre 1865-plantations.

 

Heard from a couple of Gannett types that the HighSchoolSports.net site flunked its first test for several hours last night. Page loads were impossibly slow both for users trying to do data input and those who just wanted to get the score of the East Bumfuck game.

 

Apparently, there were some issues last night -- again. Same issues we had two years ago that caused us to scrap HHS.net about 4 weeks into the season. We haven't gone back since and hopefully won't ever have to. We use our own data base, one created by our newsroom computer tech, Keith Warren. It works great for what we do.

 

It would help if high school statisticians, usually a couple of giggling girls on the sideline, did their job so coaches can send it stats quickly.

 

We got multiple e-mails about slow HSS.net response times last night, one of which provided an alternate URL to login to the stat-input program. That'll really help all the coaches trying to use the site on deadline... right?

Those messages followed an e-mail regarding when the HSS.net staff would be available to troubleshoot. If I read it right, they'd be gone by noon on Saturday. :-\

I am very happy our state hasn't started playing games that count yet. Maybe the bugs will be at least partially worked out by then.

I can always hope, right?

 

We have an AD at one school who refers me to highschoolsports.net to get the school schedules. I'm lucky to be able to print out one a night it's been so slow all week.

 

I understand what you're saying here, but the giggling girl factor has always been a factor and always will be. A bigger issue here is that Gannett thinks it's going to be able to tell coaches they have to do it online.

Problems will be multiple, not the least of which is that Podunk Tech coach will report that the Tumbleweed Poly running back carried 21 times for 88 yards, which is what will show up in the paper Saturday. Tumbleweed Poly coach will attempt to correct that to 23 carries for 119 yards and expect that correction to appear in Sunday's paper.

That's always been an issue in the business. But the new wrinkle is that he'll have the ability to change it online -- if not in the game recap, then certainly in the season stats. Goodbye, consistency.