Your Longest Inch Count

You're THAT guy?

 

helluva deduction. you must be one helluva reporter.

and i try to write short so i can keep your interest. i understand now that your mind tends to wander.

 

7 and a half inches, when I was 22

 

I don't write much, except for the occassional spot news story. But we had a funny inch story in last night's paper. Main story today's sunday 1A page was 20 inches. There was also a sidebar - that was 51 inches. Yes, a 51 inch sidebar.

 

Might as well throw this in here, too. My shortest story that required a byline was a whopping 8.6 inches.

A major football player at the university I was covering got kicked off the team and I broke the story. Problem was I couldn't get much on it because nobody wanted to talk about it, so 8.6 inches was what ran.

 

I've written a 100-inch profile and a 60-inch profile. Both were solid, I felt, but I'm sure each could have been handled in half the amount of space.

I once wrote a 50-plus inch gamer back when I had absolutely no clue what I was doing and thought everything was important. It was a good game, but my god it wasn't worth that.

 

Once found some obscure file in federal court regarding a civil claim against some farmer most people outside of this one small town had never heard of. It was amazing -- guy was defrauding banks by doing things like taking loan officers to silos that weren't him (to convince them he had enough stored wheat to serve as collateral) and misusing federal farming subsidy money.

Tracked down the guy -- he'd managed to run into the ground a multi-million dollar farming operation that'd been in his family since right after Indiana became a state. Turns out he had a number of addictions, and had hidden most of the financial issues he'd run up from his older brother, who was his business partner but had no idea what was going on.

The farmland was beautiful -- from on top of one of the hills, you could see most of the county.

Within a month of when I finished the story, the farm entered bankruptcy, and almost everything, down to a garden tiller in one of his barns, was auctioned off.

Made for a cool 90-inch story that intertwined crime, the human condition, and the downfall of one family's small-town empire.

 

that's great! 8.6 inches on a major player being kicked off the team. wow. that's solid.

 

True.

But that is an insane number.

 

Newspapers write series all the time. Magazine stories frequently reach that length. It's certainly not the norm, but at major metros, it happens plenty. We have all kinds of sports journalists here. Some can't fathom stories of that length because they'd be shot in the newsroom if they ever turned in a 60 inch story. Others, myself included, my kiss the 100-inch mark (or go beyond it) three or four times a year. It doesn't make me any better than the other reporters who writer shorter; it just is.

 

I'm not blanching at 100 inches.

520, though? wowza.

 

Do you realize that 520 inches is enough copy to stretch from the 14-yard line to the end zone?? I can hear your editor now ...

"Double Down is at the 14, he's at the 10, the 5, He SCORRRRRRES!!!! Toucdhown Double Down!!!!"