Working with early deadlines

I don't think we're talking about needing enough time to write one gamer. When the department has 2-3 gamers, 5-10 briefs and other AP content to get on the pages, proofed and sent by 10:45 is when there's a problem.

 

It's not that early to have a story in. It is, however, VERY early to have a story in AND a section done if you have to do anything more than write a story. If you've got to lay out a page, proofread it, maybe do your own photos or take an extra call-in or eight, then that 10:45 deadline hits you like a bug on a windshield. We have a midnight deadline on the weekend and on game nights I'm usually doing pretty well to get out at 11:30. More often it's around 11:45.

Toward the end of last football season my ME casually mentioned there were plans to move our Friday deadline up to 10:30, since we didn't have to wait on football games any more. I quickly informed him of the existence of things called "basketball season" and "baseball season" that involve just as many local games on Friday night. He seemed stunned.

 

My problem right now isn't so much an early deadline as an awkward one.
We're an afternoon paper and news was having trouble hitting its 10 a.m. deadline. So they moved it up to 8:30. I just found out two weeks ago that it's actually 8 for sports, and 7:30 if I'm working remotely.
I used to get into the office around 6:30 every morning, which was early but manageable. Now I essentially have the choice of working until 1 or 2 a.m. at home, or getting up around 4 to do it in the morning (and then putting in a full day afterward). Needless to say, I've mostly chosen the former.

 

Been there, done that and it just about killed me.

 

Bringing this thread back to life out of curiosity ... does anyone know of sports sections who have a fairly early deadline? Say, the 8-10 p.m. range? I'm wondering how they are facing this challenge.

 

Place I'm stringing for now has a 9:30-10 p.m. local copy deadline (later usually for football) and looks like sometime between 10 and 10:30 to send pages out, so they'll miss a few late scores and games. What I was required to do during the fall was send in a few hundred word just-the-facts-ma'am story for print at deadline, then go get my quotes and do a writethru for the web that was due at 11. It ain't pretty if you want a good print product, but it what has to be done to meet deadlines.

Look at what's been suggested here, it's good advice. On Fridays for Saturday, for example, I'd bag a full agate page and do an NFL page.

 

Back in the day when I worked at an afternoon paper, I got tired real quick of working those split shifts. So I covered whatever I had to cover at night, laid out my pages then and there and was done with it. If something broke in the morning, I'd come back in, but that happened twice in a year and a half.

 

Early deadlines are part of the elimination of the print product. Nobody in their right mind should buy a metro newspaper in which writers must produce copy off an 8 p.m. NBA game at 10:15 p.m., or a 7 pm MLB game by 10:15 p.m. Look, the writer will eventually be beaten down by the ridiculous angles she/he must take just to get a (long) story in the print edition. Then the reporter is so beaten down by writing that crap during the game, he/she's body is exhausted by the time it's time to write a readable story for the internet edition. Just kill the print edition already, folks. Again, you'd have to have rocks in your head to subscribe to a print newspaper nowadays. Deadlines at all metros are much too early. The stories, at least from NFL night games and NBA games and other games, are disgracefully bad. At no fault of the writer.

 

I do that a good bit. During football season I had to do a bunch of "weekly maintenance" stuff on Sunday night, like updating the football TV listings, NFL glance, NASCAR standings, college football glances, etc., so I usually went ahead and did the Monday section and took Monday off. Same with game nights during the week. By the time I write my story and such, the hard part is over. I can do our relatively small sections in another 90 minutes.

 

I remember we were switching over from InDesign to NewsGate and the first night of the switch was a Friday night of prep football. Want to say it was like a half-hour later deadline so 11:15. Our SE at the time typically booked for the night at 5 because, well, what did we expect him to do....work? Staff was probably half the size - now even lower - and to say it was a cluster___ would be an understatement. SE was awful and was made fun of on this site. Anyway, they had the NewsGate trainer from I believe Louisville was in town to help us. We are taking calls, writing up box scores etc. and keeping an eye on pages and he is doing the usual transferring calls so he doesn't have to take them yada yada. Starts screaming and the NG trainer says "Why don't you do it yourself?!" Was classic. I started laughing it was great.

Anyway we are probably already half-hour late and finishing score rail with last scores. We got one right as we were going to send. On the page it said xx-font-dummytext instead of score. SE is yelling SEND THE PAGES. I just said we are already a half-hour late, why not be 31 minutes late and have the score rather than this dummyyext - something was going on with page and it didn't clear it. And we can see that on the page. SE says JUST SEND IT. So another employee sent it. So every paper had this dummytext going over the rail and into the CP. Was ridiculous.

But anywho. As long as you can as stated earlier file remotely and don't have to do more than a gamer etc. should be fine. We started just having a sentence or two and a box score for Friday night games that weren't staffed with a big page in Sunday's paper on each game. Also on Friday get as much out early as possible. Start a Q and A feature to run in Saturday's edition each week on a local kid, plan another feature each week and if there is a local college in town do a feature on an athlete or team that way to run Saturday so all that's left is maybe 2 or 3 pages you need for jumps and the gamers for Friday night.

 

Out page deadlines for the paper I work for are like 10 p.m. (at the latest) on most days. I get till midnight for football Fridays, so football is usually the only gamer I get in print the next day. With everything else, I write my gamer that night and it runs a day late in print. So say it's a Tuesday night basketball game, the story is online that night and in print Thursday morning. Don't know why I do it, but that's the way it's been since before I got here. Kinda makes me wonder why people subscribe, but hey, that concern is above my pay grade.

 

Our deadlines are often affected by how many inserts are in the paper the next morning (we print our pages 100 miles way and stuff them once they're back at the office, I think to save money), so we try to be nice to advertising so they'll schedule fewer inserts on our busier nights.