By Elliott Brack
Editor and publisher, GwinnettForum
SEPT. 4, 2018 | It was an exciting time for a young cub reporter.
On that first football Friday of the season, the entire staff of reporters at The Macon Telegraph were reminded to finish their news stories at least by 10 p.m., an hour earlier than the normal deadline.
For about that time, the telephones started ringing one after the other, as reports from all over South Georgia came in about local high school games. Everyone was involved, from management on down to this young cub, taking details over the phone from one source, then another, and in between calls knocking o 3-4-5 paragraphs about that particular game.
While most newsrooms in those days had the incessant clatter of manual typewriters, seldom were they all as busy as during those Friday nights. It was a frenzied time. You could barely make out what the caller on the other end of the phone was saying above the hubbub of the newsroom.
Every now and then these regular reporters, who were not up on local sports personalities, or even lingo, would shout out: “Who is the football coach at Vienna?” Or: “What’s the nickname of the Dublin team?”
You see, The Macon Telegraph’s extended geographic coverage was Middle and South Georgia, from Forsyth in the north, to Eatonton, Hazlehurst, Tifton, Fitzgerald, Perry, Roberta and others. The Telegraph was the principal newspaper of that area. The newspaper each night had a “state edition,” with stories from those areas sent out in an edition that had an 11 p.m. deadline. The local edition deadline was 12:30 p.m. My first day on the job in 1957 was something of a surprise.
That summer I had been a reporter on the afternoon Macon News. When I came into the Telegraph office that first day at 4 p.m., to work on the morning paper, the managing editor simply handed me correspondence, saying, “You put out the state page today.” Though unbeknownst to him, I had never edited a state page; somehow, I got through that period, stumbling around. (Lookee, lookee, still doing it today in the GwinnettForum.)
What brought all this up is the changes that the internet has brought to reporting, in particular, sports reporting. Today both the Macon and Columbus newspapers are owned by McClatchy, Inc. out of California. The firm recently announced that they would eliminate their local sports departments entirely. (We presume they will use only wire-service news of a non-local basis.)
Those of us in Atlanta see a drop off in sports coverage in general, but most especially at the high school level. Every now and then there is a bright spot. One such spot is the way that the Gwinnett Daily Post covers high school sports at an exhilarating level. They really go about it. Gwinnett should be proud of such coverage!
Curtailing the space for reporting sports hurts newspapers, but they really harm the high school sports teams. Yes, the teams will continue to play; and yes, somehow, someone will report the sports scores. But you will no longer have an entire geographic area keeping up with each other’s sports teams throughout the years.
That early initiation to Friday night sports coverage was both intimidating and exciting. Perhaps it’s going on some place else for someone. It was a time like no other.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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