From Sports Writing To Writing For School's Website

I'm surprised they haven't done so yet. When they do start charing colleges for content, that may well speed up the migration of newspaper writers to college web site employees.

 

isn't this what a lot of pro websites already do? Hire writers and chunk the wire stuff?

 

Yeah, universities are just now getting in the game though. I always figured pro teams would go that route, but never really put much thought into colleges doing the same.

 

Even small colleges are getting in on it. Robert Morris, a small D-I mid-major near Pittsburgh, did it last year with Paul Meyer, who had covered the team for the Post-Gazette. They had him do a bunch of features and notes pieces to augment the SID's normal output of game stories and game previews.

 

Former AJC staffer Jack Wilkinson is now doing this, or something similar to it, for Georgia Tech.

 

Schools pay for AP access to stories through their website provider. Mine is CBS Interactive, the former CSTV.com, and they have a membership that allows our site to use whatever crosses the wire.

 

I'm assuming that was a freelance thing rather than a full-time job, though, from what I know about Robert Morris. If I remember correctly, Paul was one of the writers who took the retirement package the PG offered up not too long ago, so this probably offered up a nice supplement.

 

I was just going to ask that question. I figured that was how schools got AP access but I wasn't sure.

 

If I were an out-of-work sportswriter--hey, I am!--I wouldn't get too excited over this, because like most parts of the dot com boom, it will not last long. Maybe there will be a small percentage of schools that do it the right way and employ an ex-journo and mostly stay out of his/her way, but the vast, vast majority of schools are cheap-ass bastards who will turn this over to pompom tossing students who think doing this for free is the greatest thing ever.

 

I totally disagree.

Eight years ago, my school was approached by the out-of-work former beat writer about filling this role on the website. We declined because, at the time, our goal was to get our stuff in the newspaper.

That focus has changed since then as newspapers have gotten smaller and smaller and doing a poorer job of covering what we need covered. Our goal now is to build up our own websites and make them the place to go for daily news about our programs. Forget newspapers, they only want to cover football and basketball. We need to promote all of our sports so what better way to do this than by hiring a writer to work for the site.

I believe this will only get worse as time passes. With the addition of audio and video to our websites, we can now put our own highlights online, add audio from press conferences, etc., decreasing our reliance in newspapers to tell our story.

What this means is that access will be diminished. Instead of my office making a general release about a hiring, it will be done online, necessitating that media give credit for the story to the website. Press seating at events will continue to get worse and worse. . . someday you might even have to buy a ticket to cover a game (these are battles I fight every day against administrators who feel no need to give the media any kind of a break whatsoever).

Just my two cents.

 

Some SIDs also have agreements with certain AP writers to provide content, especially for major events.

Just_An_SID, the head of my shop and I were talking yesterday about this very thing, being the source for everything about your school. He seems to think that some state-supported small/mid-major schools could, because of lack of traditional media, bomb their media relations shops back the days where students kept stats at games and that's all.

 

I truly hope you're right (except for the part about writers having to pay to get into games). I just sense that most schools will wonder why bother paying for legitimacy when you can still get the word out via an intern.