Poll: Running feature stories submitted by SIDs

[daytonadan1983]

That's one of the reasons I prefer to look at the box score and write our own college baseball gamers than copy and paste the SID's game story. By the time you clean everything up for style and to balance it out to include relevant stuff on both sides, you're basically writing your own story anyway.
A couple of the SIDs in our area actually do put out AP-style gamers. There's only quotes from their team, of course, but they do include key plays and stats from the other side and can largely be reprinted without a lot of editing. I want to kiss those guys.

You're not my type.

 

[DeskMonkey1]

To my recollection, I have (under orders from the SE) ran a feature when someone died on two occasions.

 

[Old Time Hockey]

Some of the UVa fans can refresh me on this, but I remember some years back a UVa pitcher threw a perfect game against George Washington and the GW SID buried it deep into the release. It was ridiculous.

I had to do a little Googling, but I found it. Probably the all-time example of SID spin:

Strong Pitching By GW Not Enough In 2-0 Loss To No. 1 Virginia

 

[Doc Holliday]

I had to do a little Googling, but I found it. Probably the all-time example of SID spin:

Strong Pitching By GW Not Enough In 2-0 Loss To No. 1 Virginia

And by the way, it was the eighth perfect game in NCAA D-1 since 1957 and first in 15 years. Good Lord.

 

[BillySixty]

I appreciate all the comments.

It's funny to me that some of you would run gamers from SIDs and not features. I think gamers tend to show SID bias way more than features. Most of the time, there's only one way to play a typical "Hey, this guy/gal is doing some good things" while gamers have two sides and the SID will always, as he/she should, take the side of their school.

 

[BDC99]

This discussion is fascinating to me. I work in a fairly large market, and our local schools' SIDs can barely produce a gamer that can be re-written into a few publishable grafs. A feature might take me 3 days to put into working order. But as others have said, if it's a good story without bias, I'd certainly give it some thought.

 

[Batman]

This discussion is fascinating to me. I work in a fairly large market, and our local schools' SIDs can barely produce a gamer that can be re-written into a few publishable grafs. A feature might take me 3 days to put into working order. But as others have said, if it's a good story without bias, I'd certainly give it some thought.

Speaking of poorly-written SID game stories, I saw this one a while back and it about made me want to run face first into an oncoming 18-wheeler. Thankfully the box score was attached and all I needed to write was a couple of paragraphs on the game.
And, to be fair, I think it was written by a stringer or student and not the SID themselves.

Delta Devils' Season Ends with a Heartbreaking Loss to Jackson State

 

[BDC99]

Speaking of poorly-written SID game stories, I saw this one a while back and it about made me want to run face first into an oncoming 18-wheeler. Thankfully the box score was attached and all I needed to write was a couple of paragraphs on the game.
And, to be fair, I think it was written by a stringer or student and not the SID themselves.

Delta Devils' Season Ends with a Heartbreaking Loss to Jackson State

Gah! Who won ... Oh, there it is. Awesome in the worst way!

 

[BDC99]

Damn. Lol

 

[Flip Wilson]

Speaking of poorly-written SID game stories, I saw this one a while back and it about made me want to run face first into an oncoming 18-wheeler. Thankfully the box score was attached and all I needed to write was a couple of paragraphs on the game.
And, to be fair, I think it was written by a stringer or student and not the SID themselves.

Delta Devils' Season Ends with a Heartbreaking Loss to Jackson State

This line pretty much made that story.

With the innocent voice of a child in the background cheering, "Nothing less Valley,...."

 

[Ace]

To my recollection, I have (under orders from the SE) ran a feature when someone died on two occasions.

To give credit, I have seen some good work done by SIDs on obits of prominent former athletes. We have used the SID department to help confirm reports that a former athlete died. They have access to a lot of former athletes and sometimes put together nice, quote-filled obits and maybe photos you don't have.

I don't have a problem leaning heavily on these.

As for gamers, I think most larger papers use information submitted by schools and edit heavily for their format or maybe just pull out a few sentences.

I just wish on things like tournaments or track/cross country meets, when the SID department puts together a story on how their school did, they would include the agate of the top team finishers and top individuals so you can better check to see if anything was missed or should be highlighted.

Also, you may have a local kid at an out-of-state college who did well. But it seems that most of the time, school websites do not include the agate with the writeups, unless they were the host. And it can be a bear to find this stuff online.

 

[daytonadan1983]

Well, I was expecting the SID contempt/disdain to rear its head eventually....

1) That GW perfect game clusterfrak was a watershed moment for our office. We printed it out and took it to our baseball and softball coaches.
Baseball coach: "This disrespects the game and the pitcher. It's our [expletive] job to hit the [expletive] ball and if we can't, the post-game article is the least of our concerns."
Softball coach: "If you had to sit through that, you're entitled to write whatever you want....

Ever since then, if we get no-hit, it's in the opening paragraph.

2) I would not submit an article written by a student to the media. Bluntly, student writing isn't what it used to be when I was in school, and I blame Instagram and Stephen A. Smith. I told one class "I don't care what you think about Kobe vs. LeBron, can you crank out 135 words on Magic-Sixers at the buzzer and then 400- and 600- word write thrus within an hour? Welcome to the entry level."

3) Again, I completely respect it if you don't want to use our features. Just remember, my bottom line is getting the most coverage for my players. If you need help, let me know. But I, and your probably do as well, pine for the day when the local shop has a gamer, a sidebar, a column, notes and stats the day after football instead of one 15-inch gamer written by someone marginally familiar with the program, along with mid-week notes and player profiles. We're trying to do that on our side on all our formats now.

4) Speaking of features, what do you all think of this one?@BCUGridIron's Williams Draft Day Was Low Key - B-CUAthletics.com - The Official Web Site of Bethune-Cookman Athletics. It's our draft day piece. Since we have no one who will be drafted, I did this piece on one of our coaches' draft day experience. He went on to coach our two NFL All Pros.