By RANDY HARVEY
Associate Editor
Los Angeles Times

Story posted on Aug. 28, 2009

Randy Harvey

When I first began traveling as a sportswriter, your newspaper's deadline wasn't necessarily your deadline. You had to call to the Western Union office in the city where you would be filing from and find out what time they closed. If they closed at 6 p.m. in Lubbock or Amarillo, that was your deadline.

I suppose you could have called the copy desk after hours, told them the Western Union had closed and begged them to take dictation. But it was going to cost you good will and who knows what else? I know one writer who made a habit of supplying alcohol to the dictation takers so they would be less grouchy. It didn't work all that well.

They were grouchy anyway. It was better to beat it down to the Western Union on time. Those were the days when Western Union set up in the back of press boxes. There was a famous operator at the Cotton Bowl who, at no extra charge, would catch mistakes.

"Mr. Harvey," she would bark, somewhat sarcastically because I was nowhere near old enough to qualify as a mister. "Blackie says Craig Morton threw for 245 yards and you said 246. I changed yours to 245."

The assumption was that Blackie Sherrod was always right and I had a lot to learn about getting my facts straight. She was grouchy but correct.

That period of my career didn't last all that long. It wasn't but a couple of years later when we cut out the Western Union middlemen and women by carrying telecopiers – portable fax machines – to events.

We'd type our stories, hook up the telecopiers to the phone and send them to our offices. Later, services popped up in press boxes with telecopiers, which meant we didn't have to carry them, a relief because overhead storage space in airplanes was no larger than it is now.

Then came the switch from hot type to cold type and many generations of laptop computers – from portabubbles, which would lose your stories into the ozone any time the bands in arenas played too loud, at even the hint of thunder or lightening or at any contact with carpet, to Radio Shacks, which were light as a feather but very quirky to ... well, most of you know the history from this point on.

So I can't help but laughing when I hear someone say that we in newspapers can't change. Can't change? The only real change would be if we arrived at work one day and no one was asking us to change.

Cold type? Sure, we still use it. But we're also in the era of Vizplex, which is the cyber ink used on E-readers such as Kindle.

Maybe that explains it. Sort of. I don't know any more about how Vizplex works than I did about the Western Union. All I know for sure is those of us on the trenches, in the newsrooms, have been adaptable for far many more years than the mere 40 that I have been in the business. In no department has that been more true than in sports.

When Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times, asked me recently to give up the best job in the newsroom, sports editor, to become associate editor of the newspaper, he explained it was because we in sports had been so successful in transitioning to a 24-7 operation – to a web-first philosophy, blogs, social media, SEO, video, content sharing, television production, etc.

"I didn't know we had a choice," I said.

As my 11-year-old son would say, "That's how we roll."

I've often heard it said that every night is election night in sports. I've been around enough election nights to know that is hyperbole. But not by much. As those of you who have been writing or copy editing or designing on a night when you have to change everything on an unforgiving deadline because of a fourth-quarter comeback or ninth-inning rally, we in sports sections have to be prepared for anything to happen at any time on any given night. We are the marines.

When a corporate efficiency expert recently asked a group of sports designers and copy editors here at the Times how we manage to put out a section every night with so few people, their answer was similar to mine to Russ Stanton.

"We don't have a choice," they said.

You, as sports editors, are all faced with the same challenges every day and, based on the web sites and sections I see, you all are succeeding beyond belief. I'm not so presumptuous as to think I can offer any advice. Except perhaps for this: Create a vision for your department and attack it with the same urgency you do in producing your daily sections. Articulate your goals to those who work for you. Listen to their ideas, objections and observations. Move forward together. You take the point.

And never stop changing.

Happy Twittering.

Or whatever comes next.

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