Identity Crisis

How many people want to read about the best high school players in Richmond, though? There's a reason 80,000 people show up to Redskins games and 1,000, on a good night, show up for a high-school basketball game.

And as for golf courses, if I thought small- to medium-sized papers could do objective coverage of local golf courses, without being influenced by the publisher or the ad department not wanting anything derogatory to be said, then maybe I'd see more value in that. And even if that interference isn't there, how much is there to say, really?

 

I would say for small papers (under 20K or so), local is the lifeblood. When you get larger than that, more readers are looking to you as the primary news source, so there's an imperative to balance local, regional, national.

 

Mark 2010...i agree. and we're under 20k...now today, we went heavy as possible on henderson-rice in the hall, dungy retires, tebow surgery and clemens on hot seat as possible, but had to do some of it in a roundup..but we got it in there along with our local stuff....

other folks in similar situations as ours, being the small daily and all, do you sometimes do a big National Sports roundup in order to get in as much as possible...the space, of course, dictates so much of what we can do and i really want to get more and more national stuff in...suggestions would be welcomed...

 

Our local dailies are both south of 15k, but the nearest metro/TV stations are 70 miles to the north. Local content is the top concern, yes ... but for most of their readers, there IS no other print news source in the region, and they would not be serving their readers well by de-emphasizing national coverage.
That doesn't mean 2,000-word NBA roundups when the nearest team is a four-hour drive from here, but I ferdamnsure would like to read about the NFL playoff games without logging into a computer ...

 

And not only that, but I hope - and I'd like to think my bosses hope for me - that I'm a competent enough reporter to find a story that'll be different than what everyone else is writing about. On days when major news happens, that won't be the case of course. But on the run of the mill Wednesday, I do my damndest to find something that distinguishes our coverage. Sometimes I do well, others I don't, but I'm giving it what I can.

To the original question: We use almost all of our manpower on preps. I wish we weren't quite so prep heavy, and I wish we had more leeway to go find some actual community stories. We talked a good talk about that, but it has yet to come into any real action.

 

Hustle...you're talking getting a different "local" story from eveybody else or a national story? we've got a larger paper 70 miles to the west of us and one about 40 miles to the east and the latter usually gets wind of some of the local stuff we're doing and will cover some things, do features...but i am always trying to get something different from them...ironically, i have a big feature in today's paper on a former coach from the area and i came to find out that those two larger papers have one on him tomorrow. it's a matter of keeping the ol' nose to the grind stone, i guess.

 

I'm talking about me going up to Redskin Park on Wednesdays and doing stories that the Post, Times, Examiner, Free Lance-Star and AP aren't doing. The Redskins are local for us by almost everyone's definition (with the notable exception of the people that run our paper).

 

gotcha..yes, we try and do the same thing when covering one of the NFL or major league teams in our area. more times than not, we can almost always land a local angle to it. we have always also kept up with ex-area prepsters or college players who have gone on to pro ranks and either do features, boxed in statistical updates, etc..readers love that kind of stuff and, also more times than not, i have covered most of these folks when they played at the HS or college levels.

 

Hopefully you try to do something different. I've seen too many small dailies do the same thing as the big metros in covering the major league teams. Most of that coverage could just taken off the wire and have that reporter and photog go cover something else.

 

Well, it's all for naught now. We were told today that we'll be doing no out-of-county pro sports coverage for all of '09. Despite the fact that I travel less to get to Redskin Park and FedEx Field than I do to get to our furthest-out school.

And I've been told that 1) it's not about economics; 2) it's not about reporter competency - specifically said today when I tried to counter the argument that readers can get Redskins copy anywhere else; and 3) it's not about lack of reader interest, since the team owns a fan store in our county. It hasn't closed yet, so I'll assume it's doing OK.

But what do I know. Thanks for letting me vent.

 

and what you heard today is probably first in a series (and i don't mean stories). probably first of many cutbacks due for your paper. hope not, but something doesn't jive there.

 

Well, you don't cover them enough!