The lost art of the 'gamer'

Hold on. Some of y'all don't see the value of tweeting during games? Oh man.

When I did preps, I generally tweeted scores and end of quarter stuff. Guess what happened on game nights? The account gained a ton of new followers and it ultimately helped grow the readership/exposure/etc. And because I included a kid's name, the kid ultimately found it and retweeted it, which is helpful when you're covering a good recruit.

Some posts make it sounds like Twitter is evil. But it can probably help more folks read your gamer that only a handful of people were going to read in the first place.

 

I second this.

If you're tweeting so much it interferes with your coverage, you should slow down, but generally getting info out there is a good thing. I might be wrong, but I doubt that there's EVER a situation anymore where someone sees a score on Twitter and says,"Well, don't need to get the paper now!" Maybe that mentality was more appropriate 5-7 years ago, but now anyone that goes on Twitter looking for that stuff will just find it from someone else who retweets it. It may as well be you they get their info from.

Kids' Twitter handles are big, too. I really believe that getting high school/college kids to even know your paper exists and why you're there and what you're doing is a victory nowadays. They're likely not gonna get the paper either way.

 

No doubt. There's nothing more painful that an over-written gamer.

I try to featurize things and find hooks in my gamers whenever I can, but there are times where the game just wasn't that compelling or you're on a ridiculous deadline and just can't come up with anything. That's when I tell myself, "Just tell people what happened."

Doesn't have to be dry play-by-play, but the old Keep It Simple Stupid rule applies well sometimes. As a slight tangent to that, I'm big into describing plays when I do get into play-by-play.

"John Smith got a block around the left side at the 10, stiff-armed a defender and leaped to the front pylon" is much more descriptive for the reader than "John Smith scored on a 10-yard touchdown run." If you're doing the latter, it's pointless if the game summary says the same thing.

 

I have read and had to re-write many play-by-play gamers from stringers. Those are the worst. Use some nuance and as others have said what is something the fans may not have noticed? Write something that others aren't. Make your story stand out without being overwritten. Don't need each touchdown play in the gamer.

 

Ahb, but there's the rub.

If you have someone who's writing something others aren't, and he/she is making their story stand out without being overwritten ... if that's the type of stories they're turning in ... they either aren't a stringer or they won't be a stringer for long. They will have moved up the chain.

 

Or they're that golden, beautiful soul who has a decent paying day job, but just likes stringing for the extra money/experience.

Make sure that person never moves.

 

After I heard Dave Kindred was covering a girls high school basketball team on Facebook, it was my fervent hope as a sports editor that Wright Thompson was going to show up at my newspaper and ask to be on the local swimming beat.

 

In this day and age of little to no access before games, good luck covering high school and college games for the dead fish newspaper and the early deadlines. There's nothing to fill the hole but lousy play by play gamers. And websites should be ashamed of themselves making the reporters write game stories to be sent shortly after the conclusion of the game. Just wait for the gosh darn box score and run that and let the reporters report on the interesting stuff they get post game and not worry about writing these gawd-awful game stories!

 

That's a patently ridiculous take. Not only have sportswriters been filing game stories against impossible deadlines for a century, it's part of what makes them special. You just want to file everything and anything into the "life sucks" file.

 

Websites shouldn't have printing deadlines though. He's not talking about getting a story done in time to fit it into the print copy here.

 

Or, if the game ends at 10 p.m., the story shouldn't have to be filed by 10:15. Filing by 11 or 11:15 should be fine.

 

That was a patently ridiculous take.

My former co-worker filed by 12:15 last night for a football game that ended at 11:30. He filed a 28-inch column and didn't mail it in. And he did it because of a print deadline. It goes with the job.