The weather didn’t impact only scheduled sports events this week. It took a toll on us via what probably was our earliest deadline since we went to an a.m. paper in the early 1990s. It happened Thursday night, which is our earliest off-the-floor deadline (last page OK’d before it goes to the press) of the week. Deadline is normally 11:30, as opposed to 12:10 most nights and even later Fridays. But out of concern over getting papers to households on icy roads, our deadline was moved to 10:30 Thursday. That’s hard on us in sports with last West Coast pro and college games, let alone prep games that were just finishing up or still going because of tournaments with late starting times. We had to tell some coaches to just give us a score and a highlight, and we missed others.
Where it really manifested itself, however, was in our main package on our section front. That was the Blazers in possibly their best game this season, with Brandon Roy scoring 52 points. With a deadline of 10:30, we started to panic a little after 10. Desk guru Kevin Goff had us in good shape with everything else, but the Blazer game was still going. At 10:15 or so, Luke Andrews, with radio tuned to the game, started writing a few paragraphs. I put together a couple just as filler. The game ended around 10:25, we gave our makeshift story a fast read, threw it on the page and sent it to film. Ultimately, we missed deadline by 5 minutes. And clearly the story left something to be desired. In our haste, we left out the score, but then we were writing the story before the game was over. Plus it was very short. As frustrating as that product was for readers, we felt the same way. But deadline is deadline, and if we don’t meet our end of the production cycle, it messes up everything down the line, something bosses hate.
Fortunately, we were able to run a nice follow the next day on Roy and his sensational performance.
