Sunday, June 28, 2009
From the Newsroom: The All-Timesland section heads into its 10th year
From the newsroom
Michael Stowe, managing editor
Related
Recent columns
- Placement of pictures easy as ABC
- A responsibility to depict life -- as it happens
- A reminder of all that's good about print journalism
- 'Under 21' encourages discussion of campus drinking
From the Newsroom blog
High school sports editor Robert Anderson took a well-deserved break much of last week from one of the most demanding jobs at the newspaper. But he didn't get out of the office before working with Sports Editor Jeff Gilbert to finalize the details of our annual All-Timesland section published in today's paper.
If you haven't seen it already, check it out.
This is the 10th year that we have published the annual section recognizing the region's top high school student-athletes in 12 different sports.
This year's 20-page section reviews the year's teams from fall and winter sports and reveals the teams for baseball, softball, golf, boys' and girls' soccer, boys' and girls' tennis and track. It also honors Patrick Henry's Kate Norbo and Radford's Jon Thompson as athletes of the year.
The region's top prep athletes have earned All-Timesland status (as selected by writers and editors at the paper) since the mid-1960s, according to the paper's archives. The idea to feature all of the teams in a year-end special section was developed by former prep editor Daniel Uthman in 2000.
Gilbert designed the first section and has played an important role in producing nearly every one. For the first seven years, the section was simply a compilation of photos and player names that varied in style and feel from page to page. Three years ago, Gilbert and Anderson started planning the section in the fall -- nine months before it would publish -- to develop a visual theme that would provide a more consistent look to the section. In 2007 we featured the "Superheroes of Timesland," and in 2008 the section had a video game theme.
You'll notice that the images in this year's section have what photographer Kyle Green describes as a "gritty" or "industrial" feel to them. If you look closely at the credit, you'll also see that each image is labeled as a photo-illustration, newspaper jargon used to describe photos that have been staged by the photographer or manipulated though digital photo editing.
Related
All-Timesland section
Video
In this case, every athlete pictured in the section was shot in our downtown Roanoke photo studio. Each background scene was then shot at fields, tracks, courts, courses and parks around the Roanoke Valley. The two images were combined in Photoshop (one on top of the other), then a Photoshop filter was applied to bring out the highlights of the image
Inspired by the work of Los Angeles-based photographer Dave Hill, Green and photographer Sam Dean collaborated to come up with the format for this year's section.
Green said he likes the method because the images have a unique, almost hand-drawn feel.
"It really makes it look surreal," said Green, one of five staff photographers who used it to create images for the section.
The popularity of the All-Timesland section continues to grow and we sometimes get requests to recognize more sports -- lacrosse is an example in recent years -- with All-Timesland honors.
Through the years we have added sports as they have grown more popular and become common at the vast majority of schools. Lacrosse hasn't been added because it is still played by only a handful of the 53 high schools that make up Timesland. But at the rate it's growing I won't be surprised to see it in a future section.
Whatever happened to the graduates section?
Several readers called or e-mailed in the past couple of weeks after noticing that we didn't publish a graduates section featuring photos of high school seniors in the Roanoke and New River valleys. We discontinued the section this year to reduce our expenses.
The section didn't have enough advertising support to offset the time and resources it took to produce it.
Eliminating it was a tough decision -- because we realize some readers looked forward to it -- but one that saved us thousands of dollars.
We did provide expanded photo coverage in the Virginia section of most of the graduations in the Roanoke Valley.
