When's the latest you should get the score in a gamer?

Third graph at the latest. Tabloid training dies hard. Famous exception. He's an excellent writer and wonderful person, but in one of the years Borg won Wimbledon, Bud Collins' story in the Globe had the score the fourth paragraph AFTER the jump.

 

Bud Collins was probably one of the few who could get away with it, too. But in tennis, the actual score sometimes can be irrelevant. Like in golf.

 

The score does need to be the first set of numbers, but the number of grafs depends on the length of the grafs.
If you write a lead like this:
This time, no doubt.
This time, no maybes.
This time, no win.
The Dick Goyzinias used tight defense to hold the Ann Arbor Lil' Napoleon's at arm's length on Saturday with a....

But if the lead graf is 40-50-60 words long the copy editor should be beaten and it needs to be higher than the third graf, if they are of similar style....

 

There are some numbnut stringers who put the score as late as possible in the story. You want to get people to read the whole story, you know.

 

I once worked at a paper where one of the staffers would write these long, convoluted HS football gamers that often had the score buried 8-10 inches into the story. The fun part was when we had to cut the story down to 7-8 inches -- it was a HS gamer, after all -- to fit on the page and had to make sure we weren't cutting out the score. Usually they got rewritten anyway to put the score higher. Right on deadline, of course.

 

Hear, hear, Tom Petty.

I guess the hard-and-fast rules are OK for the hacks who don't know how to tell a story.

But when somebody knows what he's doing, he knows where the score fits.

 

Sometimes I wonder if people do that because they don't want you to cut anything.

 

hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

slice and dice, baby!

 

No need at all to ruin the flow ... just make sure the story flows by the score sooner rather than later.

 

I'm with Petty and Aunt Jemima on this one, I'm not a big fan of the inverted pyramid style and I think you can tell a moving story that works with readers without the rules.

The other day I wrote a story about a no-hitter. We had the fact that it was a win in the headline, so I could afford to drop the actual score a few graphs down to detail a bit more about the pitcher's accomplishments and stats. I don't think not having the final score earlier ruined that story in any way.

In general, I think it just makes sense to put the score in ASAP, but there are always stories which are exceptions to any of these rules and a good reporter will know when and when not to be that exception.

 

Dear Red Canuck: I agree. A no-hitter, after all, makes it kind of clear what the final score was, or at least who won (then again, I covered Matt Young's no hitter). I didn't mean to knock Bud in any way. He wrote a damn good story that day. I was thinking of how the Herald demanded stories were written.