Hyper local!

my bad, continue on bullwinkle

 

Yeah, but it brings people who normally don't give a rat's ass about sports (those "parents and grandparents of the winning team") to read your section. Add those to the folks who read every freakin' line in a sports section (and there are plenty) and you've just upped your readership for the day.

 

I was criticizing the emphasis, not what got covered. They could print school lunch menus for all I care, I just don't think they ought to make it prominent. My opinion is it's too big a market for that, that people want a grown-up paper.

 

That's even worse.

 

Until your every-freakin'-line readers get pissed off at having to read Little League features while the MLB roundup gets hacked to two grafs a game.

I do not and will not understand why Little League gets coverage. You get a team to Williamsport, come talk to me. Until then, no one cares except those who are involved and already know what happened.

 

If it's online, which this seems to be, those every-freakin'-line readers just click on something else whilst the parents and GPs click on the LL story.

Your sports home page is still getting more hits and people are picking and choosing what they wish to or don't wish to read.

 

Granny, I think you are maybe being a bit too micro for that market. Even in a smaller place ... my hometown daily when I was a kid was nicknamed by the locals as "The Farmers' Almanac." They liked the fact that we covered the shit out of those small town, but they thought our lack of proportion with the outside world was ludicrous. Nixon could visit China and it would be on Page 8, and the lead art on A-1 could be of a local man grasping a giant zucchini. They read us, but they did not take us especially seriously ... because we didn't take THEM seriously as sentient adults. You treat dummies like dummies, they resent it. You treat educated adults like dummies, they resent it more.

 

They don't do it every day.

It's not in print.

It's online.

They didn't waste a reporter.

The only idiots are ones who don't give a shit about it and click the story anyway. Hey, they're mistake and it's another Web hit.

 

One time we ran a letter to editor from some woman bitching because we don't cover tee-ball and Little League. The next day I was in the grocery store and some guy I always see at the minor league baseball games (he always likes to talk about Univ. of Iowa basketball) came up and said, "If I ever see a fucking Little League story in your paper, I'll cancel my subscription and never read your fucking paper again." And then he walked away.

 

i want that guy's autograph.

 

I love grocery shopping. I was on a roll a while back...getting the odd compliment every time I hit up the local food mart. Then, a week later, I had a guy stop me and ask how I slept at night after writing "nasty" things about "our boys" followed by a few suggestions as to the best way to end myself.

Oh, and the day I get sent out to cover nine-year olds is the day I bring back an 18 inch gamer and a letter of resignation. Call it entitlement, but I just can't stomach it.