What the hell?!

Those of you who have subscribed to E&P are familiar with the annual syndicate directory. Ever looked in one? In the days before pagination, some syndicates offered columns and even pages by mail that were already typeset, all the newspaper needed to have done was get a compositor to wax the back and paste it on a page. Mostly weeklies and very small dailies used this. The resulting pages looked sort of like ransom notes with all the varying fonts and gutter widths. So this kind of thing has been available for a long time, but most papers still chose, even when using the same canned syndicated copy, to do their own pages.

 

Spnited, sorry I snapped earlier (see my other thread!). But those stock, NASCAR, MLB stat, NFL stat etc. pages already exist at CP. So, I'm left to believe this has to be pages with stories on them. I can't see what else it can be, especially when it says they are going to "assess the potential benefit of ADDING PAGINATED NEWSPAPER PAGES to our line of NEWS products."

 

Fine, you win, They're going to put out entire Page 1s for papers who are too lazy to do it themselves.

Geez, you're on stubborn fuck!

And I bet you haven't been in this damn business more than 5 years.

 

Been in it 10 years.

And, newspapers, like those in the Sun chain, the Metro chain and in Black Press (all in Canada) have centrally located paginators. Metro has been producing pages in Toronto for its papers in Ottawa and Vancouver for the past two years. Sun is about to make the move, also producing certain sections in Toronto (Entertainment will be done in Calgary) and Black Press has been doing it for a year in Vancouver for daily papers across BC.

I just never thought I'd see someone like CP offer the service.

And, finally, I never once said Page 1s. I said NATIONAL and WORLD. Can you read the post?

 

And they never said National or World...
prepackaged, prefabs...like the old syndicated shit Ridgeway mentioned or the NASCAR page AP offers...NOT LIVE NEWS PAGES!

 

I subscribe to the weekly NHL stats page from CP, used to do the baseball one but stopped using it and readers haven't complained one bit.

This looks like an expansion on that, possibly whole pages of agate prefabbed on a daily basis instead of weekly?

I could also see them trying to sell a stocks page or other pages that might look pretty similar nationwide, at least content-wise.

To be honest, I'd be interested to see what such pages might look like. Would there be space for me to add in my own local agate as well? Would the pages be ready for my deadline? Does CP realize that I want all of one league's boxscores but none from another league? Can they tailor different pages to different regions (say, one for each time zone)?

Might just have to give Harold (it's Herschel, not Hersch, by the way) a call on this one.

And SSM, chill out. I agree whole live news pages would be bad because of the editorial ramifications (same product, no individuality, etc.), but you're jumping to conclusions on this.

 

Herschel, that's right! Hersh was a minor league hockey player and a contestant on The Bachelor one year. Prefab stat pages -- or partials at least -- would work to a degree, but you'd need a couple of columns at least to tailor to your local audience for local stats. I could see a feature hockey page, built around LeBrun notebook stuff and standup features once a week or so, maybe the same thing in baseball season if you were in Blue Jay country. But in our neck of the woods, for instance, is Red Sox and anti Yankees country. We wouldn't have the editorial space to devote to such a page in a five or six page run -- unless the powers that be told us that's the way we're going, of course.

 

Geez, spnited, rough night? You'd think this was the first post to involve speculation, a topic shift and a discussion of journalism.

Yes, I read the job ad. Did you? I noted it said "Our original product will be pages of sports results, using templates," leading me to believe if people buy it, there is a possibility it could be expanded to other sections. In my little mind I can't imagine how, but I did note the ad did not limit itself to just sports results.