Here are a series of front pages replicated to resemble what I was working with last Wednesday, when the Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings were all playing on deadline. That was one of the more difficult nights to deal with deadline I can ever remember, because each game got done within the last one and a half of deadline that night.
The first page shows that we had to have a 'plug' story for the Tigers game, their second game of the season in Kansas City, an 8 p.m. start on a night with an early deadline.
So, the plug story was a nothing filler about David Ortiz remaining in the Boston lineup a day after blowing up on his team. I really didn't anticipate having to actually run the Red Sox story, but I had to have something in place to cover myself (because you can't send out a blank page after all). A game box with a Web refer was left in the Ortiz story to send our readers to our Web site for the Tigers results.
The second version has the Red Wings photo, because hockey is a relatively quick sport, as well as Pat Caputo's column about the team's chances in the playoffs.
In the third frame, you'll notice the Pistons game story came in from The Palace, as did the Red Wings story from Joe Louis Arena. The only hitch? The Tigers game had just headed for extras.
And there you have our first edition paper, complete with a Boston Red Sox story front and center.
After a short period of printing, the press room stops at a particular time in their press run and 'replates' with updated pages. Fortunately, we then had enough time to get in a Tigers story, after they blew the game they had in hand in the top of the 11th. But for all of our stat junkies, there was a problem with STATS LLC., which produces the box scores for The Associated Press, the same box scores we run on the inside pages, so there wasn't one added.
And that my friends is the evolution of a sports page. Hope you enjoyed our time together learning about the miracle of page production.