Like the intro says, this comes under the heading of, “What were those guys thinking?” That would have been my reaction if I opened Friday’s sports section and found a Pac-10 basketball roundup that had Oregon’s game against Stanford as the lead item but accompanied by a photo from the UCLA-Washington State game.
I was the layout person, so I have a good idea of what happened.
It was a perfect storm of sorts: early deadline, late basketball and enough space to keep us going at high speed throughout the meat of the shift with little time to assess things.
The original plan was to put the Beavers and Ducks on the section front. Neither was expected to win, and the games were playing to form when I checked late in each. As things got busy, I didn’t check the scores again until I went to the wire to pull the stories. I was surprised, to say the least, to find the Beavers had won to beat Cal as about 18-point underdogs. Normally we’re monitoring that stuff as it happens, but the work pace didn’t allow it.
Meanwhile, the UCLA game was over earlier, and it was slotted to lead the Pac-10 roundup. The color photo was on the page and had been sent to imaging when it became apparent the Beavers should dominate the cover and the Ducks should be moved inside to the rup, as we call it. It take three to four times as long to call out the four negatives for a color page than it does for black and white, so swapping out the UCLA photo for UO a half-hour before we were to clear the last page was not an option. And trust me, I dearly wanted to do it. Two other color pages had yet to move, and that complicated matters.
So, we got the Ducks in the lead but stayed with the UCLA pic.
For the preps, we had a Phoenix boys photo and the Phoenix girls as the lead. That was simply a product of one of our stringer photographers being at the boys home game and offering up a photo that wasn’t planned. It was a chance to give a team some play, so we took it.
In case you’re wondering, I did not make deadline, something that did not sit well with my superiors.
One of the good things about this business is we get to start from scratch again today.
