By BRAD ZIMANEK
Appleton (Wis.) Post-Crescent

	AGATE FOR DUMMIES

Gordon is not known as "The Agatollah" and Grimes as the "Agate Master" for nothing.

Their message was clear: Agate is important so spend the time and money to deal with it effectively.

"I thought it was fairly helpful, certainly the speakers were incredibly gung-ho," said Neil Pascale of the San Luis Obispo (Calif.) Tribune. "The most helpful thing about the workshop was simply concentrating on agate, which I must admit I don't do as a practice. As a result, I think we'll look at expanding our agate with much more design to it."

Gordon said one third of sports sections on average every day are made up of agate with the range between 29 and 36 percent. At the National Sports Daily, where Gordon earned his nickname, he said that number rose to 40 percent.

"Every single newspaper runs it whether you are 500,000, 50,000 or 15,000 circulation," Gordon said. "The only difference is how many resources are devoted to it."

Gordon and Grimes presented eight steps to help each newspaper come to grips with and ultimately hope to improve its presentation of agate: analyze, strategize, design, editing, time savers, local agate, bigger steps and giant steps.

The initial basic steps are to evaluate how much agate your section runs, what point size is best, what column width is optimal and rank and prioritize what agate needs to appear in your market.

Their litmus test for having a complete package was that if they were driving into your circulation area and picked up the newspaper and read nothing but agate, would they know what happened in the sports world from the day before?

Other helpful tips were to include an agate budget along with your story budget each day, help your readers to create packages that eliminate wraps (including baseball boxscores) and package even within a package (list results in the same conference together and, for example, put all golf — wire and local — together under the same header).

Gordon and Grimes also discussed 50 editing tips that an editor can put into practice immediately to conserve space including deleting all p.m. references from schedules (especially when it forces a line break), using one-letter keys (for example in auto racing C-Chevy, F-Ford, etc.) and dropping the nicknames in transactions, especially in the instance of minor league teams with long names.

"The Agate Master and the Agatollah encouraged us to think about our agate pages, what goes into them and how we set agate-page standards with our staffs," said Randy Brubaker, the Assistant Managing Editor/Sports of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. "One thing they emphasized, that many of us could do a better job with, is communicating what we want to run on our agate page to our copy desk crews. Too often, that's an afterthought — as was pointed out to us.

"I went to the Thursday afternoon session, and I think Chuck and Lee discovered that trying to fit all their material in was just like trying to do the agate page on a busy Saturday in the fall. There wasn't enough time or space. But give them credit for giving us some things to think about."