How would you cover the Super Bowl?

Yeah, pretty much.

This is why you hope like hell your hometown team never makes it. Tremendous expense and pain in the ass. Newsside gets heavily involved; it's no longer merely a sports story. Management and advertisting get involved. When you have a large staff with too many levels of bureaucracy it can quickly turn into a nightmare.

 

That's perfectly valid justification. Filling up a section with wire photos is easy. Making that section look good and, more importantly, having photos and copy work together is a bit more difficult.

That kind of thing is hard enough for regular-season coverage. No way -- if there's a choice -- you take that chance with your team in the Super Bowl.

 

How would I cover the Super Bowl? It'd be tough since apparently the only people involved in this year's Super Bowl are either named Harbaugh or Lewis. How many stories can you possibly write about them?

 

Crowdsource everything then run the gamer Tuesday because Sunday's deadline is 9:30.

 

That brings up a real good point. I wonder how some of the papers with early deadlines handle it. When Tagliabue (or maybe it was Pete Rozell, can't recall) was commissioner, he said he would always protect the print deadlines by not pushing the Super Bowl kickoff back to, say, 8 or 8:30 ET. Even now, with kickoff at 6:25 --- as it has been for the better part of the last 25 years --- with the extra commercials and extended halftime, it's close to 10 p.m. ET when the game ends.

I know AP has normally done running stories and topped it with a 25-inch gamer that moved within minutes of the final gun, so in that way it is better than some other major events that go really late.

We're getting to the point in newspapers that makes you tempted to say "what's the point?" if you move the deadline so early that all relevant news has to be second-day.

 

I wouldn't. It's just a big dumb event now, with too much BS surrounding it.

[/WillLeitch]

 

Three Alabama papers won't have to worry about print deadlines tonight. Super Bowl? Stories? Photos? Shove it in Wednesday!

 

If the life reporter is from news, fine. Let the resident 30-year-old nightlife reporter who slums around in hipster bars 200 nights out of the year go down there and do that.

I send two shooters, one to do the daily get-around stuff and one to get the life around town. It's called a "scene" because people want to see it, not necessarily read 800 words about.

Here's a question as we move into this multimedia age: What about an on-air talent? Somebody who's on the staff to use for any number of reasons, but goes to the Super Bowl to run down celebs, get Beyonce on camera, Jim Rome for a segment, etc. Throw a videographer in there, too.

 

Is New Orleans planning a special edition tomorrow, on account of they're hosting this shindig?

 

I'm of the opinion that if you want to do video for an event like this, you better do it very professionally.

 

Agreed. But I think it's trending in that direction and it's something newspapers can use on Web sites.

 

Outsource the whole thing to Indians.