How important is the sports section to the paper?

I purchased a medium-sized city's newspaper on Sunday and kept the A section and its extension (which had an A-1 jump), the B section and the Sports section. The rest went in the trash.

Sports drives newspapers. If it's not the driver then it's in the front seat navigating.

 

In opposition to the observation about the sports section always going missing, check out the comments at the end of stories. A sports story may never draw a comment, particularly preps stories. On the other hand, even mundane local budget stories in news, or a crime story, is likely to draw dozens of comments even in small papers.

 

Even giving you this - and I don't think it's true - is it disturbing? Is this just another version of the idea that putting Paris Hilton on the cover of A1 every day is the easiest way to boost single-copy sales?

 

The whole idea of a newspaper is that it represents a balance of important information that people ought to read to be better citizens or to (gasp!) learn about things they didn't know and information that people LIKE to read. Both are valuable services, and people like having access to both in the same place.
Measuring reader interest by the comments thread on a Web site is a flawed metric. People who aren't cranks, bigots and all-around loonies read the news, too.
Sports is the most expensive and labor-intensive section in the paper. So there's gotta be a damn good reason no newspaper's ever had the guts to drop said section.

 

They don't drop it, but they sure as hell have slashed the spending. Because, honestly, it is horribly inefficient from a strict bang-for-the-buck standpoint.

 

When the Herald made its cuts in 2005-06, what remained was a sports department bigger than the news department.

 

Not sure if it means anything, but I've noticed a lot of sports news stories being pilfered in both our paper and the competing major metro in the past year. Seems like whenever we've had a major local sports event -- not even unique things, but events that happen every year -- sports has taken the sports angle and news has had some sort of feature angle. I've noticed a similar trend in larger local papers and USA Today.
Last week, the major metro I mentioned had THREE sports elements on A1 (a news story on a major statewide story; a picture promoting a football playoff game between two local rivals; and a news/feature angle on a college game that weekend).
If sports isn't important, something about it is stirring up interest among the news types.

 

I think a standard newspaper article - and maybe a magazine article - is the perfect format and length for the attention span of an average sports fan. There are some diehards who will buy books about their favorite teams, more as keepsakes. There are fans on one end of the spectrum that love knowing the "inside" stuff, so they'll buy the books that take you behind a program or a team or a league for a year/decade.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the demographics for your non-anthology/yearbook style sports books are predominantly other writers and sports writers.

 

I'd say how much sports coverage drives sales of the paper depends on multiple factors such as size of the town and scope of the paper. Our sports coverage is almost all prep coverage. I don't have a number or percent, but when people come in to buy a single copy or take out a subscription, if they give a reason the main reason given, by far, is because their athlete kid/grandkid was in the paper. At a previous shop, when doing season preview stories I almost always had a couple of coaches say something like, "The season is about to start, my wife said I'd better restart my subscription for three months."
That ties into my second point: it depends on the quality of the paper, or at least it has in my personal experience. The previous shop I was referencing put out a crap product. Our two-man sports desk busted ass and covered the heck out of the local sports teams. On the news side the effort wasn't there and it showed. People around town knew the paper was garbage and our work was buried inside, so people seeing the paper on the newsrack would look at the crap front and never know we had a good sports section. There will always be people buying the paper for sports. But if someone doesn't mind either way about sports, could take it or leave it, then the quality of the coverage won't matter if the news stories aren't interesting enough for that person to make a purchase.
As far as should people purchase a paper just for sports, my initial reaction is why should we judge someone? If someone buys the paper for the sports coverage, who are we to judge them for that? My second reaction is how do we know they're not interested in local/national/international news coverage in the non-sports pages? If a person tells you, "I only read your paper for your local sports coverage," do we know that means the person is only interested in sports? What if the person doesn't read the rest of the paper because the non-sports coverage is crappy or uninteresting to that person? Maybe that person would read the paper for schools/news/business coverage if there was decent schools/news/business coverage, at least in that person's eyes.

 

Had an old lady come in complaining about the size of the crossword puzzle. Her solution was to take away the sports page and make the crossword bigger. Never mind that our crossword puzzle is in the classified section and the size of the sports section has nothing to do with it and never mind that Wal-Mart sells those jumbo, Mr. Magoo puzzles if she wanted a bigger one. To each their own.

 

I'm sure we've all taken the call from the cranky reader who doesn't like when sports is on A1. Some readers get personally offended by that.

 

Much more often I've gotten the other side of that: People pissed their game didn't get on A1.