From the Beat: The Good and Bad of Deadlines

 

About halfway between Dixon and Amboy, Illinois, I received a phone call from SVM Sports Editor Ty Reynolds that the Eight-Man football game I was covering was going to be picked up by one of our sister papers, and thus, I was going to be writing on deadline. Fortunately, the soft deadline was 11:15 PM which wasn’t much different from the time I had been trying to hit with my other game stories this season. I had asked that my games be ones going to web and not on the deadlines for the morning print edition.

I hit the time easily, as my game between Amboy and Hiawatha finished by a few minutes after 9 p.m. In fact, I made it back to the Telegraph office before Ty, who was about two blocks away at the Dixon game.

When I started at SVM back in 2004, the newspaper printing was done in-house and done at like 10 AM. So, essentially, we had all night to write. My memories of that were long nights where everyone seemed to work on everything but the paper due the next morning.

Thankfully, around 2008 or so, we went to a morning delivery, so our deadlines changed to about midnight or 1 AM. I was a fan. Writing on deadline forces focus. When it comes to game coverage, it should translate into more concise, tightly written stories. I am a firm believer in short gamers. Leave the longer pieces for feature, investigative and enterprise stories.

As much as I liked having a deadline, too early is a hinderance to a quality product when it comes to sports. Sadly, when Shaw shut down the press at SVM to print the local papers in the suburbs, the new deadlines make it impossible to have much if any game coverage in the section. Shaw’s plan is used by the bigger newspaper chains in the country. They slash staff, print all out of one place, and then tell you the newspaper industry is dying because circulation rates continue to drop. It could never be, in part, because they aren’t providing what local people want. I’ve never understood why if you’re going to print dozens of newspapers in one place, why not go back to being an afternoon delivery, so that you can still provide readers with results the next day, plus it provides the chance for school-aged kids to get back in the paper delivery game.

Anyways, I made deadline Friday. If you’re a writer, I recommend putting deadlines on your projects, because it forces action. Check out what I produced Friday here: Amboy-LaMoille slows down Hiawatha for victory – Shaw Local