Hyper-local folks: How'd you get through summer sports coverage?

Very simple. We don't have enough space.

In the fall, winter and spring, we'll cover a Middle School playoff match but only if A.) it's the championship game or B.) We have nothing better to do. Occasionally, we'll do some sort of youth sports feature but for the most part we ignore it until summer.

And, when people do complain (which is rare), we tell them we've got no problems running standalone photos/results if they send them along. Usually, most tell us they will and don't. Sometimes, they do and we run them.

It works out well.

 

To me, hyper local describes the type of newspaper that uses no or very, very little wire copy, the type of newspaper that covers a defined area and rarely (if ever) strays from that.

For us, we're not allowed to use AP (In the three years I've been here, we've only used one AP photo, of a local athletes who reached the Olympics) and, if we didn't have enough space one week, we'd gladly run the story from the local cross country meet over coverage of the area's D-I college basketball team.

 

We actually did a lot local in the summer.

We had little league baseball and softball that took up much of late June and all of July.

We also had spot features. We had two minor league teams (soccer and baseball) in the heart of their season from June through early August.

There were also a buncha kids at camps across the state and some coaching changes that took place that also took up a considerable amount of our coverage.

Maybe one day each week, two tops, had anything national on the front.

 

We covered a ton of camps, did local road races and features. Actually had tons of local on the front all summer.

 

Williamsport tourney.

And we justify that to the complainers in the other seasons by saying, your (insert event here) isn't on ESPN.

 

For some reason, now that I think about it, we don't have that issue. Youth soccer or basketball parents ... we never hear from them, though if a team sends a photo or results, we'll run it. But we do primarily only cover little league when it comes to youth sports, even though I detest little league with an undying passion.

 

Here's how I get through summer sports coverage: Four weeks of vacation.

 

Hyper local here means, at the least, no AP on the front page ever. And if at all possible, no AP at all in our news space (pages 2 and 3 would be the only other places for a chance of AP appearing).

But like I said earlier, our publisher also understands that we can't get away with not including, KU, K-State, the Royals and the Chiefs on the sports page. If we still had a Monday edition, I'd put in NASCAR, too.

In fact, someone came in a few days ago complaining about the fact that we run only the Royals. "I'm not a Royals fan," he said. Well, I don't know what he expects being in the heart of Royals country and all.

Funny thing is, the attitude here is that those sort of things can be found in other places (CNN, ESPN, the Internet), but I field complaints on a regular basis from people who don't have cable TV or the Internet (It's a rural and an older-skewing community). The paper may want hyper local but it doesn't seem our readers necessarily want that.

 

When I was an SE ... I took four weeks of vacation and let my underlings deal with it .

We did a golf package one day a week (profile someone/golf tips/maybe a "favorite hole" at a local course ... can do a lot of fun things with it).

There's a big motorsports scene where we are, so we did a racing package once a week with a feature, local racing notebook that got in a ton of names, et al.

That knocked out two of the days. We usually ran photo packages on one or two days as a centerpiece (and we ran a roundup of all of the youth baseball, bowling, rec golf, et al, submitted photos on an inside page), and maybe cover youth league teams if they got past the district level in the Cal Ripken tournament (Ripken is Babe Ruth's junior division, and is essentially the competitor to Little League). Otherwise, features -- find out the non-prep stuff that you've had squirreled away for a while and get on it.

 

Furloughs killed us during the summer. Legion ball is weak around here so we looked at the off-season activities of prep teams and individuals. I couldn't see us covering adult softball....does big mean 30 people in the damn crowd? Most of them don't have scorekeepers and it would be hell to collect anything from those parks.

 

Two words: Photo package. No need for a game story on beer league softball, but 2-3 photos arranged with a long cutline might knock out a slow day.

If they do have scorekeepers (the local parks & rec department requires them to fill out a report at the end of every game that would get sent to me), then they can submit the results if they want to.

 

Same, basically.

We cover the shit out of a local all-star football game in the early part of summer then blanket coverage on a big motorsports event. Usually a good bunch of features on people who do individual sports like sky diving, boxing or iron man pad out the summer. This year we also had a good deal on a big horse race, a decent amount on a rodeo event and some good supplement coverage to a regional PGA tournament.

In the past history pieces have been popular during the summer especially a good series we did on the history of each local high school football stadium.