Is your paper cutting back on prep football coverage?

And what's your point Gutenberg? If the money's not there to hire stringers, it's not there. Period.

 

So, the SEs should just spend money even when we've been told there isn't any?

Sounds like a way to quickly become unemployed yourowndamnself.

 

Where, pray tell, is the money for stringers coming from?

 

We've actually been amping up our coverage, too. We don't try to do much statewide like we used to, but we hammer our home base and surrounding counties. We have five full-time prep writers and other folks on the staff are called in to help out. We have a ton of on-line stuff. Plus, our high school sports editor is excellent. Best boss I've ever had.

There haven't been many good things come out of the last two or three years, but one good thing is that it's made sports editors realize the importance of high school sports coverage. You can touch a ton of people in the community and, let's face it, you get a lot more bang for your buck. (Who really cares when the columnist goes to the Olympics and writes about curling?? That's nothing but an ego rush.) I've had a couple of bosses in the past who have been pretty dismissive of high school sports. They actually thought it was beneath them to deal with it. You don't see that much now, I suspect. . .especially not where I work.

 

Having our staff reduced by 20 percent this year, of course our prep coverage is being cut.

We're trying to compensate in ways I agree and disagree with. We have a huge circulation area. A few papers in the same chain share many counties with us. One paper is sending us one of their gamers every week which is fine because of our staff size, we never get over to their area any way. But the main high school in the city has won five straight state titles. When they play on the road at a city where one of our chain papers is at, we are not going to the game. Instead, the other paper is covering it for us. I don't like that idea one bit.

 

I second that. Stats people are your friends when you're taking both notes and pics. During football, keep track of where the stats person is and stay close when possible. After getting the shot, you can yell out something like, "Hey Mike, was that 12 yards or 14?" My experience is they'll usually work with you.
And having shot pics with most of my sports stories since 1999, I can tell you it may seem intimidating at first but it's not as bad as it seems. After a while it will become second nature. Do it enough, it'll seem weird to NOT take pics during a game. That's how it is for me, at least.
Really, I've never understood why more papers don't have one person doing the story plus pics. I admit there is some compromise involved, but with practice you can do both well plus it frees up staff to cover another game (or two or three, in the case of a photog).
Another idea is to see if there are photographers (i.e. parents, boosters or just people who love doing photography) with decent equipment who cover the team all the time, and see if they would be willing to send you some images. I'm not talking a mom with a cheap point-and-shoot, I'm talking someone with a DSLR and external flash. Talk them up, they may even be willing to send pics they get from away games. One of our schools has a husband-and-wife duo that goes to all the FB games and sells pics on their own. After chatting with them, they offered to help us out if needed.

 

I've been taking pics and stats on the sidelines for years, and basketball is much more difficult than football. It only takes a little practice. Football also has a lot of down time between plays to let you write down the stats, unless someone's running a two-minute offense.
Second the idea of a helpful parent or fan who knows how to correctly use a camera. There's an area mom who's taken pics for me for the past two years and she does great work. I'd pay her if we had the budget (we're a small weekly covering eight schools and the sports department is me, a stringer and her).

 

Thanks guys for the comments -- the point is don't be trying to fool the readers that you are the SOURCE for all things prep football when you are cutting back and everyone on your staff knows that what you are doing now is a shell of what you used to do. If prep football is your bread and butter and you are an SE, then go to bat for your section.

Part of being a supervisor is being able to problem-solve and point out what's best for the sports section. Too many SEs these days are more interested in CYA (Covering Your own Ass) than doing the right thing.

That's what I was trying to convey. Please continue to throw out differing opinions if you don't agree.

 

They're not disagreeing with doing what's best for their section. They're disagreeing with your simplistic notion that all an SE has to do to acquire more resources is "sack up".

Maybe you've only dealt with capricious, mean-spirited editors in the past, but normally when those in charge of a newspaper tell you there's no money for stringers, it's not because they want to fuck with you. It's because there's no money for stringers. All the sacking up, going to bat, foot-stomping and breath-holding in the world isn't going to change that fact.

Do you honestly believe it's the SEs who are proclaiming their paper as the source for prep football, especially when they're the ones who know first-hand just how hamstrung they are? You're foisting the sins of the advertising department on the SEs and, bizarrely, blaming them for not standing up to the "nobodies on news side".

I don't know how long you've been in this business, and I don't care. Every so often, you post something that suggests you lack even the most tenuous grasp of how sports sections operate outside the Ivory Tower.

 

KYSportsWriter, who works with me, can attest to this:

Our paper is amping up coverage, thanks to the efforts of our sports editor (I've worked with him going on 9 years).

In two weeks, we're launching Game Night, a 16-page all-color tab. Ads have been selling great, actually better than our 20-page preview tab (which might have been our best ever).

We think the readers will like it because of more (and bigger) color photos, more to offer (expanded stat leaders, notebooks, more sidebars and columns). Plus, in the main sports section, a Saturday cross country meet/golf tournament or soccer game isn't getting buried inside because of Friday football game(s) since we do not have a Saturday edition.

And the best part about it? Because Game Night is considered a special section, we're not uploading everything in it to the web. Meaning that if readers want our prep FB coverage, they have to buy the Sunday edition (no more poaching us online for free).

We really think this will work. We'll see.

 

Oh, I know how the advertising people work. I have been in those meetings. I've seen plenty of things get done when the first answer was NO, the second answer was NO WAY and the third answer was HELL NO.

I've managed budgets and worked for SEs who got things done. You can continue to be in love with the 2008/2009 way all you want and I hope you enjoy the ride as the industry worsens and the product continues to go downhill.

I'm glad I work for a place that hasn't dropped its standards. Judging by the comments all over this message board, that's a rare thing. When we claim we are something, we back it up. Period.

 

I'm not seeing any basis for your claims we're all bragging about being our region's preps leader in any of these posts. That sounds like a slogan for the local sportstalk station than any newspaper I've worked for or read. We're all doing what we can with the cards we've been dealt.

If indeed your have a publisher who's letting you go balls to the walls as in the past on Friday nights, more power to you. But that's no reason to diss what others are doing. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. If I've learned anything in my career, it's which battles to fight. When we're cutting positions and reducing our publication schedule by one day, and I'm braced for that "temporary" pay cut for last quarter continuing into the next until we right the ship, it's not the time to see if there's a stringer or part-timer budget. But I did let my ME know what my ideal deadline time would be, and what I could live with. I got what I could live with, and now I've got a plan to make that deadline.