Reaching out to local daily

Avid member, SJ. But, went the anonymous route for this question.

I've reached out to the local daily offering/seeing if the SE would like a photographer for local sporting events.
My background includes running a small daily as the SE before moving to a different state and getting out of the business. However, I still shoot quite a bit and back when I was at the paper years ago, shot decent Friday night football.
I'm not saying my photography is above whoever is taking the current photos, but the paper has yet to feature any action shots of games.

Few days since emailing the paper, I have yet to receive a response if they would welcome the help or don't need it. Paper only covers one school, has a small section, and never has an agate page let alone stats from the games. Paper itself is quite large.

It's been so long since I was running my section, but I do remember I always welcomed freelance help because I was trying to cover numerous schools. Did I cross a line by reaching out?

Thanks

 

Of course not. Nothing wrong with reaching out. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect an immediate response. Or even a response at all, as we have discussed elsewhere in these parts. As you might know, larger papers get requests all the time from people wanting to write/shoot. Most papers also welcome freelance help, especially this time of year. But they likely have most of the stringers lined up who they already know. I'd just be patient. My guess would be they'll contact you when/if they need you.

 

Good points. I was just jazzed to get back into shooting prep football again and wanted to help add to the paper's section. Oh well. I shall wait and see what happens. Next home game is either next week or the one after and I may shoot it just for heck of it to add to my portfolio (if I can). I could not for the life of me find any old photos I did take. Our paper was just getting online when I left (2004) and I have since upgraded computers numerous times.

Thanks for the reply, BDC99

 

If the paper only has one school to cover, it could well be they can handle preps in-house pretty easily. Have you offered to cover just preps football? If so, I'd suggest offering to cover anything they might need. Another idea might be finding what opponents the one school has, then contacting papers covering those schools and offering to cover their teams when they play in your city.

 

Both good suggestions, too.