How to (not?) cover the NCAA tournament

I don't have a problem with staying home and finding a way to get it done, especially with recent budget cuts plus the fact it was a surprise berth...last-minute plans can be expensive.

However, they should have at least made the effort to contact the coach, AD, players, someone after the game to get quotes and a better feel for the game/experience. Perhaps, they did and it just didn't work out.

Hard for a newspaper to put out a ton of $$$ to cover a team's 30-point shellacking as it sounds like this was.

Closest I can get, is our recent freeze on freelancers forced me to listed to the state-sanctioned webcasts for our small-school state tournament this year and call after each game to get more details and quotes. No budget to hire a freelancer in the area and no $$$ to send someone across the state overnight 2-3 days.

It's the new reality, and we just have to do the best we can within our tight budgets and limited staffs.

 

I imagine another issue, too, is that UA-Pine Bluff is probably on the far fringe of the Little Rock paper's coverage area, whereas UALR's women are a hometown team.

I suspect they had to decide how to get the most bang for their limited buck, and chose to save the money on the trips to Dayton and Jacksonville, cover UAPB-Duke from the office and shell out for UALR's trip.

Sounds to me like they did about as good as they could have done, given how they chose to play it.

 

Maybe not on this scale, but of course this goes back to the days of Panasonic Stadium and covering myriad events off radio.

Strictly from an in-the-business perspective, the absence of a dateline covered their ass. Whether readers understand it or not, that's how WE indicate we attended something, or didn't. Flip side: Readers might not notice the dateline IS there when somebody covers something. We get feedback e-mail all the time that includes "if you were there and had seen the game" -- I guess they assume we do it all from our couches.

This argument has been going on for years and years.

 

When I get that "If you had been there" response, I'm guessing they think the story is based on a coaches call or parent information from the other side, which is rarely if ever the case...people just don't understand our business. We use datelines only to note we covered something outside our area. No dateline would mean we got the info through phone calls.

It should also be noted that these "if you had been there" calls often come from people who think they could grab our laptops and do the job better

 

I've seen "couch columns" written by people who make it clear upfront they were not at the game, but watched it on TV. Quotes are either attributed as being from post-game conferences or in notes released online.

That's somewhat lame, but at least it isn't blatantly fraudulent.

Clearly implying you physically covered the game when you didn't, is.

Readers are not schooled in the technicalities of journalistic attribution. If the story is bylined, the reader assumes the writer was there (unless, again, it is explicitly stated that he wasn't).

 

I think the reader assumes that if the story is in the newspaper, it has information he wants to know and doesn't give two poops about how it got there.

 

That's quite a stretch to assume that a story in the newspaper has information that the reader wants to know.

 

The average reader thinks any schmoe sitting on his couch watching the game on TV could write a perfectly acceptable professional game story.

When newspapers actually do it, this belief is strengthened.

 

Pine Bluff is 40 miles from Little Rock and the Democrat-Gazette is one of the few true statewide papers left. (Did the Pine Bluff Commercial send anyone?)

If it was truly a budget matter, they wouldn't have sent anyone to either.

 

I so fail at geography (LOL). For some reason, I had Pine Bluff confused with Blytheville up in way NE Ark. In the words of Emily Litella, "Never mind." :-X

 

Very true. I can say that any decent sports beat writer, given the ASAP sports printout on the internet, could write a very good game story. A very good one. And a LONG one. Probably could write a sidebar as well. Take the quotes from the postgame radio show and the postgame interview on TV and you could have great coverage without being there. Now if somebody gets hurt and the reporters are afraid to ask in the interview room and it's not on ASAP you might have to make a phone call to the coach on the team bus.