The Cleveland Plain Dealer is doing something with its sports coverage that all newspapers should do with theirs: they’re retiring the traditional game recap. [That sound you hear is Les Bowen losing sleep.]

Ted Diadium, describing what his paper is doing instead— a series of short-burst stories highlighting the most interesting things that happened:

As of July 18, when Major League Baseball returned to regular season play following the All-Star Game, observant readers noticed a significant change in the way we went about reporting the team’s fortunes. The narrative game story (the “gamer,” in newspaper parlance) that told the tale of the contest, recounting the ebb and flow, highlights and low points and how the runs were scored, was missing.

In its place was a series of short bursts of information and anecdote, each with its own headline, designed to hit the keys of the game in a way that was more interesting to readers who likely already knew the essentials of what had happened. The report begins with a four- or five-paragraph summary, followed by a brief “what it means” perspective piece, and then several short highlights, each with its own headline and each able to stand on its own.

“Nobody reads ’em,” said Chris Quinn, vice president of content for the Northeast Ohio Media Group, when asked the reason for abandoning the gamer.

“The traditional game story told fans what most of them already knew,” he said. “(The new approach) allows our experts to provide perspective. I would rather give people five cool things relating to the game, with their own headlines, instead of burying them in a long game story that readers might not get to.”

Raise your hand if you’ve read a game recap recently.

In 2014 there’s virtually no need for a 500-word article describing what happened in a game. Between highlights, YouTube, team webpages, play-by-play game summaries and the like, anyone looking for a recap of what happened has much more visual and descriptive options than a block of ink or virtual ink. To their credit, CSN Philly has been inching closer and closer to this sort of thing with their coverage. But this is still a town where the jointly-owned newspapers send two beat reporters to away games to write virtually the same story.

Anyway, we’re getting one step closer to those robot Flyers beat writers.