Your Longest Inch Count

Longest story I've ever produced for a newspaper article is 64 inches and I hope to the dear Lord I never have to do it again. It was about a school's financially strapped athletic department (gross).

So what have you written?

 

Why don't we ask your mom I did a 60-inch piece on a sandlot baseball team with a long history in the area, but I broke it up so it felt more like five 12-inchers. Not bad, not my best work, but it wasn't exactly 60 on a gamer, either.

 

Did one that was about 120 inches. It was a diary type piece of life on the road with a team for about five days. Went over really well.

 

It's generally the same length every day, though maybe a tad bit longer when I'm watching Katie Couric.

 

That's GOLD!

Ok, since I posted the train wreck, I feel guilty. So I'll oblige. My longest inch count story was 125, it was similar to the above in that I followed a high school basketball team for the days up to and including a sweet 16 game in the regional tournament. Luckily for me, the lads won in overtime and I was able to get some good stuff.

 

Last summer I wrote a 90-something inch story about a group of overweight women who run triathlons. Pretty amazing stuff including one who's lost over 200 pounds, one who didn't learn to swim until her 40s and a quadriplegic who is almost back to competing.

It got cut down to 70-ish. But still, damn long.

 

Dude that sounds like a helluva interesting story.

 

Longest newspaper story I've written was about 90 inches, a year-in-review in a span when we had a number of state champs in preps, a kid drafted by the hometown MLB team and another kid who was a Parade All-American in basketball.

Had a magazine story recently that was 10K words, all told.

Yes, I can be verbose.

 

worked with a guy who wrote a 97-incher on finanical troubles in a little league. Managing editor cut that to 45

 

Took him four hours to edit it in three tries over two days... lot of repetitive repetition
ME said there's no way a 97-inch story is going in a paper with my name on it...

 

The longest story I ever wrote was a 40-incher on a wrestling coach who was sent to Iraq with the National Guard right before the season started.