How long is too long?

I did not mean sabotaging the story. I meant cutting that cutesy kicker when there isn't time to massage out six widows.

We generally run color photos for staff-shot events, even inside, so cutting the art at deadline isn't an option.

 

Oh. I hadn't thought about the production part of that. See, paginating pages either on Harris or InDesign, our two systems, we just crop the art the same as B&W. We send the page as four complete-page separations. I can change a color 4x8 into a 3x5.5 inside a story in about 10 seconds.

 

Our color has to be to the printer 15-30 minutes before deadline unless we have a good and unusual reason otherwise. A standard football Friday night would not qualify.

 

You're hired!!

 

Hey, Drip, I can even make the edges of the player nice and fuzzy to make them look like they're fast when they're slow.

 

Amen, amen and amen to that!!

 

These threads are really enlightening. You can tell who has actually worked at a real paper with real deadlines and been forced to make decisions on the fly with the clock ticking.

 

One other thing, and the vets here will know this. If you cover a daytime event and get your copy in at, say, 7 p.m., you will almost always be assured of getting everything in. I can make adjustments and will do so unless you are just incredibly long and overboard.

If you are the last story in that night and the rest of the pages are already built, it makes it much more difficult to adjust. I try to budget space pretty well, but as you go along you paint yourself into a corner and sometimes there is no other option besides cutting.

 

I'd go with 12-14 on a prep gamer, maybe 18 or so on college/pro gamer. And a decent feature should be 25-30 unless it is a project or a great story. Anything more than 40'' is overkill unless it is very well done.

 

I think Drip is onto something here. Too many writers -- especially young, wide-eyed sports writers who think everything they see is the greatest thing they're ever going to see -- overwrite their copy. Lots of superfluous observations and superlative descriptions laid on too thick.

The art of sports writing is to figure out how to be descriptive without overdoing it and how to work in observations that actually lend something to the story. And guess what? You can save some of that stuff for a second-day piece, or a notebook, or to pull out as a great anecdote for a feature. A gamer should flow out of you without you having to sit there thinking, "How am I going to structure the lead? How am I going to structure this anecdote? How am I going to transition out of it?" If you're doing that and there's smoke coming out of your ears, you're working way too hard on a gamer.

One memory I have from early in my career is an editor on one of my internships who would let you start writing for a while and then ask, "how much you got on that?" You'd say, "uh, it's 17 inches." And he'd say, "hmmm ... I don't know ... I think it's only 14." That was his way of telling you to cut, so that he didn't have to do it.

 

To clarify, my "write what the story deserves" was because he said he had a hard time thinking a feature was too long at 15 inches.

I've written 12 inch features. I've written 50-inch takeouts. I've edited 40-inch stories I had to cut to 25.

On features, ones that are pre-planned, write what it deserves. Talk to your editor as you work it (assuming it's a multi-day story) and all that. I used to go to Moddy and say "I've got some really good stuff here, stuff no one else has had" and he gave me the room to work.

But I also didn't get a request for 18 inches then write 35 because "that's what it deserved.

Communication and planning, people.

 

I almost default to thinking about gamers when it comes to deadline and cutting.

If I give 15 inches and 12 were all it needed, I would have had no problem taking out how a TD in the first quarter was scored, which would have been in the last graphs. But I was also smart enough to put the records and who they played next in the first 10-12 inches.