Is recruiting coverage the answer?

I do find it ironic to crap on recruiting coverage and those that are interested in high school sports then take a paycheck covering the games. Of course there's a difference between a healthy interest in how your school/team does and obsessive stalking of these kids, but when newspaper are dying a slow and painful death, it would seem like anything that drives readers to your product would be seen as a positive.

 

Uh, no.

 

damn solid.

 

A lot of metro daily prep coverage sucks anyway.

I'm not prepared to toss the idea overboard without knowing more about it, though. That would never, ever work in a market like ours ... but again, if their prep coverage sucks and they're looking for an organizing principle, well maybe that's a starting place.

 

A friend of mine once said of these people who intensely following recruiting, "Basically they want to know who they're going to hate for the next four years. They get all excited about every guy that's signed, and the minute they get on campus they rail on them for four or five years about how they haven't lived up to their hype."

 

My impression from the outside is that their preps operation is actually pretty big and pretty good. They've got a whole slew of part-timers they rely pretty heavily on, so it gives them a large staff to work with. They're slotting 4 or 5 of them to focus almost solely (but not 100%) on recruiting, while their "temporary" part-timers chip in by making some calls one or two nights a week.

The rest of their preps staff (I don't know ... something like 10 guys) will continue to work mainly on more traditional preps coverage: gamers, features, previews, etc.

I'm not certain of all the details, but this was how I understood it.

Obviously, a small paper couldn't devote these sorts of resources to this, so maybe this is something only a major metro with a large staff could pull off. The answers so far have been interesting, and I'm not sure if this information changes any thoughts on it. It just struck me as something I didn't think a newspaper had really tackled before, and I wonder if it could be successful.

 

Middle-class America weighs in on this idea.

 

i'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but there's definitely a measure of exploitation of these kids at work here.

i'm baffled by the popularity of "recruiting," which seems to be a regional thing, because at the northeast and midwest dailies i've worked at, it's an afterthought, there's little or no demand for coverage of it, and it's not something we would even talk about.

let's face it -- what percent of the kids who commit to D-1 schools actually end up even playing there? and what percent of the ones who do actually end up having an impact? and what percent of them stay there and graduate (or go to the NBA)?

the notion that regular updates of what some teenage kid is thinking, where he's visiting, what schools are "involved," etc., are worth putting in the paper is foreign to me and other papers in our area

we just do'nt do it

 

Western State is in Division II, jackass!

 

Run decent streaming video of the high school games.Show certain games on the internet, with a decent video quality. Even a fan sitting in the stands filming would be fine. Do a game of the week.

Have fans submit videos that can be edited into a long running clip.

Of course, charge a $20 yearly subscription to the website for this or something like it.

There are much more creative ways to take advantage of the paper's website than posting rumors about where a kid might be attending college.

The internet gives away something for free. I know the paper is trying to put something on their website that people may want to pay for someday, but I just don't see this idea working.

Figure out other types of media people would only receive through the paper's website.

I think a video of a game or a podcast of a high school coaches or selected player interviews forum would be a better avenue.

 

Your No.1 point is the most insightful remark on the entire thread. Reader interest in recruiting absolutely funded from the college side of the fan base, and a newspaper that saps resources for prep coverage in order to compete in the recruiting game is not thinking straight. The smart ESE's are adding to (or at least maintaining) prep coverage, not subtracting from it. Preps is the only element of the sports section where the internet can be beaten with regularity, and the market for it (though small compared to pro/college sports) is growing and as well, more loyal to print than pro/college fans. Your No.3 point, however, casts a blanket stereotype that just isn't entirely true. Many newspapers that cover recruiting do it with integrity, break their share of news (or at least, what is considered news in recruiting circles), and do it without publishing a single rumor. There are websites that do the same. It's just the bad ones that perpetuate the stigma.

 

Trench, IMHO, it's all rumor until the kid signs a letter of intent (not always binding) or signs the scholarship paper.

Up until then it's all jerking around and tail wagging dog.