An idea I had

It's hardly some original amazing thing, but I've decided to do a this date in history thing beginning football season that is entirely local.
I'm going to do something like the AP sportlight but with more details. It's going to be a lot of work digging through the archives, but I hope to get a big jump on things during the summer.
Anyone tried something similar or have suggestions to how to make this successful?

 

You plan on doing this EVERY day during the season?

 

Yeah, if that's too ambitious I might just make it a football thing and then once a week during the winter and spring. Nothing during the summer.

 

Since it's football and they don't play every day, why not do it once a week for that week? That way you don't have to cover every day. I did this about local MLB one or two years, a few graphs for the Sunday paper spotlighting one item in history for that week. Fun but a bit time-consuming, lots of microfilm-gazing. There were times when I wished I hadn't started it -- a few hours that could be spent more productively on something else.

 

Whatever you do, do not do it every day during the week.

If it's for football, make it part of your weekly preview pages. I used to have to dig through our archives to find all that crap.

The way we did it was we picked a week in a year, say 1985, and recapped all of those games from that week. We spread it out over the years so we wouldn't have any repeats or whatnot, and people really liked being able to reread a story like that.

 

At my old shop we had a sports history in the paper every day where there was a hostorical thing from 10, 20 and 30 years ago for that day. It was a time consuming thing, but it's just a matter of sending a part-timer back to the microfilm for a couple hours during a rainy day to get as many days as they could. It probably only took about 15 minutes to do a week if you could avoid reading the stories.

 

Yeah, my plan is to get out ahead of things during the summer. Obviously if that doesn't work I'll scale it back to once a week.

 

I'd start with doing it one day a week, just to see if people are reading/talking about it. I know the first one I did back in 2003 got several readers e-mailing me and my boss telling us it was a great idea and to see if we'd keep doing it.

 

I'm kind of hoping for reader feedback actually. I have some of the best teams in history (one from 1909) to look back at, but I'm hoping people will send something saying "hey, little Johnny was on a shit team in 1982, but he did score 50 points in a game that year."

 

I did this at my shop for a few years, though I did it the difficult way.

I went back 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50 years and ran it every day. Called it "Turn Back the Clock" and even designed a logo. Bold-faced each name and every once in a while, dropped in a piece of art.

Readers absolutely loved the feature, even requesting we change the years we were using.

Unfortunately, as mentioned, it was a TON of work in terms of time. With positions not being filled, "restructures" and now furloughs, the time to invest is just not there.

 

Just do a "this week in football"

 

I like the idea, but you haven't mentioned how you will utilize Twitter for this project.