"We don't cover you because you don't generate page views"

Could you do more to help the newspaper website get more clicks? Linking to gamers, features on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

 

I remember being on the other side of this covering bad mid-major basketball. I'd pull up the web reports and see fewer than 300 people read my gamer (one such game involved meeting the esteemed Mr. Dan), and what do you do? Preps often don't move the needle either, but at least with preps compared to small colleges, you know most of the 300 readers buy from your advertisers.

More interesting was readers who saw it as your duty to cover something they had no interest in reading. At a prior stop, this was an issue where the biggest school in town (and only true public school in the paper's home city) had long been catered to. There's been rules you had to staff their home games and we'd call them for stats if they forgot, which was frequent. As the staff thinned, games occasionally went uncovered, in part because only one sport had far and away the most heavy interest, and success was so assumed because of the team's history, people didn't read game coverage en mass (at least online) unless the team was very, very good or got deep in the postseason. I had a chat with a fan bitching the paper wasn't at some game, and I asked, "If the paper is there, will you read much in depth about a 2-10 team losing by 15 to a 13-1 team?"

 

This reminds me of a "chicken or the egg" discussion I had with a former SE.

I was covering preps at a southeast paper that was heavy on football. The SE had just started at the paper during the fall season and immediately received a complaint from either a parent or a coach about us never covering any volleyball matches. He asked me why and I said it was because we don't get many readers for volleyball stories and I was using my limited resources to cover football, which readers did want. He said something to the effect of "Maybe we don't get many readers for volleyball because we don't cover it well enough." Fair enough, I thought, and I tried to up the presence of volleyball in the paper a tick, him being my new boss and all.

It is something I've turned over in my head a few times since then. If I had busted my ass to make our section to the go-to place for our area's volleyball coverage, would it have mattered even a little bit? Would it be better to get one less football feature in the paper so I can squeeze in a story about an interesting regular season match? I still feel like it wouldn't. I think there are just certain sports in certain areas that don't matter to anyone but the people playing them or their parents. Sounds harsh to say, but that seems like the reality of the business, even more so now than when I left it.

 

You make a very good point. Years ago, before "clicks" mattered, the newspaper was the record keeper.

 

I read an article 25-30 years ago where someone said that if you covered an event that is not on television no one was going to read the article. What do the metrics in mid to large size dailies show about preps coverage in larger markets? How often does a preps article exceed the most trivial article on the local NFL team in page views?

 

How much of preps coverage is due to the fact that most sports editors and sports writers started out covering them and maintain a sense of duty to cover them? And in the good old days when newspapers had the advertising revenue to have more editorial space and larger staffs it filled the white spaces.

 

Silly question, by "limited resources" what do you mean? Football is usually Friday and Saturday depending teams' facilities and volleyball is usually middle of the week. Did volleyball try to play all of its games at the same time as football (which seems silly) or were you working park time? Even if you have notebooks and previews to write, doing at least one volleyball match per week doesn't seem like it's too much to do.

 

Why do it in the first place? "Because" shouldn't be the reason. I don't understand the "paper of record" argument. Every single event in the community should be covered with that rationale.

 

Then you're probably not going to be satisfied with any answer we'd give.

We took great pride in being the "paper of record" for the state when it came to prep sports. It made us more of a one-stop shop -- HS, college, pros.

 

In covering preps, there is more than just football. I just wasn't sure how one has so few resources that the only thing available to cover is a sport that plays once per week. If you have college and pros to cover and you can only do preps once a week, that's one thing; but if your bread and butter is preps, why not cover volleyball?

 

I say you have talk to the local sportswriter'a editor.

 

I REALLY miss the tabloid for sports that you guys used to do. That was a fun read when I got a chance to look at it.