The feat was historical because it was only the second no-hitter thrown in post-season play ever.
Two days later, an article appeared on Mediabistro.com, from the SportsNewser section, about Major League Baseball quickly creating an ad about the event.
Here's a link to the scant 108 word article: http://www.mediabistro.com/sportsnewser/
Amazing, isn't it? That MLB 'hurried' an ad on air to celebrate this? (You can watch the spot here: http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=12775649
Really? What's so amazing about this? Did anyone really think they wouldn't do something? That they wouldn't somehow use this to promote the post-season? It's an amazing athletic feat, it should be the subject of many pieces.
The point of my post is to comment on the first line of the article, "Talk about quick turnaround."
The game ended on Wednesday night October 6th at approximately 7:45pm ET.
The spot was to begin airing on Friday at approximately 6pm ET/3pm PT.
This is almost a two day lag time.
In my opinion, and I'd venture to say, many other people's as well, that's not hurrying to crank out a spot.
When I worked at Fox Sports Net, if your assigned team was in the play-offs, you were turning around spots very quickly after every game of every series. You watched the game, made notes, and worked with an editor during the game to start piecing things together so that once the game was over you only had a few shots to add, or maybe graphics to insert, to finish the spot up and get it on air.
Two days would have be a luxury.
And, after watching this spot, I'd like to point out a few things. First, the backplate, or graphic at the end of the spot, was already built and there are no other graphics or special effects in the spot. The video is straight cuts from the game. This is one of the easiest types of spots to build.
Yes, there is voice over on the spot, so someone had to write the script and then the writer/producer had to get the voice guy to read it. But all that can be done in, at most, a day. If the voice over guy is using a phone line, it can be done as soon as you can e-mail him the script and get him on the phone with an audio connection.
As I mentioned, we used to do this all the time at Fox Sports Net without any trouble, usually in under a day. Many, many times in under a few hours.
So, while I don't like to bag on other journalists, that opening line, "Talk about quick turnaround", is really a very lazy, and quite inaccurate, line.
Did this writer, who writes about sports, ever work in sports? I checked his credentials and it said he worked as a runner during the NBC Olympics, so he should know something about sports production.
Really, he doesn't even need any specific sports knowledge to about turnaround time. News organizations often turn out packages within a matter of minutes of outside footage arriving in house for editing. All you have to do is watch a newscast of any kind to know this. CNN does it on a daily basis, 365 days a year.
So let's be careful about how we define 'quick turnaround' in the future. Let's try to reserve it for instances that truly represent a quick turnaround.
For example, if that spot had aired 15 minutes after the last pitch, now that would have been what I consider an instance of truly quick turnaround.
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