I was correct afterall :)

Journalistically, you are absolutely right. But readers like it. I don't think picks are worth all the potential trouble. The same goes for high school all-star teams. But management types tend to ignore those types of issues if they think they can snag a few more readers in the short term.

 

Flex, to celebrate your win, I made you a cookie. But I ated it.

 

Heaven forbid we do something to snag a few more readers (or maybe advertisers).
We get more feedback from our HSFB picks than any other section.

 

At office, we have one daily (with a bunch of weeklies) and the daily has the town's name in it but it goes out county-wide. The namesake paper played one of the weekly paper towns (which I do a major part of my job) and I picked the weekly paper team to win, which they did, for their first win in the series in history. Call it a mixed bag of compliments and curses.

 

The bad far outweighs the good. You either get an innocent bystander like OOP hammered for picks another staffer made, or you get someone who gets too into it and starts criticizing these kids and teams like they're the Titans and Broncos. And for every fan who gives you good-natured grief for picks, you get 10 parents threatening to cancel their subscription and holding a grudge against you and the paper until the end of time. The short-term gain is minimal and not worth the long-term damages.

And really, advertisers? There is something really, really wrong with the idea of "PODUNK COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL PICKS PRESENTED BY PODUNK CHEVROLET." Really, hideously, irreparably wrong.

 

FWIW we haven't lost a single subscription (or even been threatened) because of our paper's picks. And we do have a system to gather feedback from those who do cancel.

And selling sponsorship of the picks is no different from any other ad space.

 

Oddly enough, our picks never got a sponsor, but our rankings did. That always cracked me up. Then again, rankings are safer because you can call it a poll (we actually did run a poll of local coaches and our own staff) and you avoid the temptation to make asshole comments with the picks.

nmmetsfan, I'm with BYH on this one. I've fielded plenty of those phone calls. You do more to create enemies for your paper than you gain with reader interest.

 

What inspired me to never have picks came from when I worked at a radio station in Dodge City. I was new guy at the old station; old guy took his stuff (and advertisers) to a new station. The Dodge City paper did picks every week and both of us were part of that.

They had a pep assembly before a game with their big rival. Both of us were invited but they only asked old guy to speak. In the pics column, both of us picked rival high. They understood it in my case because I went to rival high. But the old guy had been Dodge City's radio guy for at least 15 years and they threw him to the wolves. They had him stand up there and justify why he picked rival high. He did that then promptly went into ass-kissing mode saying how he didn't want the rivals to win but he had to pick them because he felt like Dodge hadn't been living up to expectations and felt like they needed a challenge.

So was he trying to weasel his way out of picking rival high or was he actually using his pick to motivate Dodge City? Either way, he wasn't being completely honest.

And that made an impressionable guy working his first radio job after graduating college decide he was never, ever going to do picks.

 

The key to doing picks is remembering that you are the one reporting results. Only the people at the games have to know you were wrong.

 

Did picks at the second paper I worked for.
One time I was out doing my "Hey coach, just want to let you know I'm here at the game, please don't run right off the field and onto the bus," thing, and one of the coaches gave me a little grief for the fact that I picked against his team. Now, don't get me wrong, I to this day consider this coach a great, great guy. He just really thought his team was the better team and was going to win. I ended up being right (not a fact I ever brought up), but I always felt slightly uneasy about the picks. I was the one who had to talk to all the coaches every week for previews, so, in the back of my head I always figured doing poorly in picks was a small price to pay for not running the risk of pissing a coach off (I didn't always pick local teams to win, but I'd occasionally pick teams to win that probably never deserved to be picked, especially if they were playing a not-that-great (but better than them) out of area team).

 

We do picks but each reporter doesn't pick the game he is covering that Friday.

 

Some of you can disagree, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I've noticed the picks are a great talking point in the community, and I'm happy to have people talking about the paper.

Yes, we've had some of the "why did you pick the other team" questions, but it's all in good fun and we try to keep it that way. My favorite response is "prove me wrong."

Of course, I'm not a beat writer anymore, either.