Should papers from non-World Series cities send reporters to cover the game(s)?

And down the road in Palo Alto ...

A home that may be infested with rodents is on the market in Palo Alto with a staggering asking price.
Neighbors were stunned when the dilapidated home went on the market for $1.8 million.

The house is in such bad shape that prospective bidders can’t even go inside to take a tour. Part of the house is being held up by wooden posts.

“It’s obviously uninhabitable,” Ashton said.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/10/21/uninhabitable-palo-alto-home-on-market-for-1-8m/

Haudricourt could probably sneak in, though.

 

Somebody will buy it for the land, tear it down and rebuild, I guess.

 

Anytime a house is bought/sold, most of the sale price is for the land, not the building.

 

Roger.

Huh?

 

Nowadays it seems Winter Meetings would be a better allocation of funds than the World Series for a baseball writer if your team isn't in it. I would still say Super Bowl is best for NFL background stuff. I'd also find more journalistic value in Summer League than the NBA finals. You have more time with agents, coaches, GM's and incoming players.

 

Sure. Local preps. Do readers in small towns give a crap what the team 400 miles away did in a state playoff? Seriously doubt it. I worked at a 35K circ paper that covered the hell out of preps. But we sure as hell didn't send anyone to cover state if none of the locals were there.

 

St. Louis is such a baseball-crazy town I can't believe they aren't there. The other notable absence to me was Cincinnati simply because it's a baseball-first town. For what it used to be, sad to see no Dallas Morning News there.

 

St. Louis probably said no because of its continued Denkinger tantrum.

 

Preps are one of our big deals, but we're not sending a reporter halfway across the state for state finals unless one of our area teams is involved. We'll generally run the short championship-game recaps that the AP moves over the wire or the association puts out on its website and call it good.

 

I probably didn't explain our situation well enough, either. As the paper that does the state rankings and that sort of thing, we still look upon it as being the state's "paper of record." Even if we aren't a daily anymore. So yeah, we're still going to take some interest in state finals even if it doesn't include locals.

 

Oh, I get that for your paper, it would be worth covering state finals regardless of who's playing. You can make a case that the entire state is your readership area. And the truth is, there's enough interest in statewide preps at my shop that it's worth using the newshole for a championship-game roundup even for teams that are not in our area. We just wouldn't staff the games unless we had a team playing.