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It's 2013, have you killed your MLB page yet?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by HejiraHenry, Mar 26, 2013.

  1. wicked

    wicked Well-Known Member

    Press three buttons on your smartphone and you can pull up almost any box score in MLB At Bat.

    For those who still do a baseball page, I imagine an entire season of interleague play is going to screw things up immensely.
     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    The local paper never has a score for a game that started after 5 p.m., unless it's the local team.

    It's really embarrassing. At my first paper, they would regularly chase pages to make sure every single score got in.

    It's the difference of places that took a tremendous amount of pride in the product that was put out, as compared to today, where the goal is just to put the product out. I understand it and I don't fault the people who work there, because they're doing the best with the resources that they have left.

    I just really don't understand why anyone takes the paper anymore.
     
  3. SixToe

    SixToe Well-Known Member

    It's not the same. The 40-year olds and older who want and enjoy seeing the scores in the paper have yet another reason to ignore the print medium not providing what they want.

    But it's the way things are so you gotta deal with it.


    How many of you run college football season schedules and boxes, or the skeds/boxes for NHL, NBA or NFL? Have all those been eliminated, too?
     
  4. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    You may as well shut down the sports section if you can't adapt and figure out a way to make MLB prominent every day. Sure you miss many scores from the previous night because of deadline, but with proper planning and ingenuity you can have plenty of relevant baseball words and stats every day.
     
  5. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    A few ideas to start with:

    * I used QR codes a lot in Trenton. They work. The SE saw their value and began to use them during the NBA and NHL playoffs because of the Sixers and Devils and Flyers. He set up a blog for all of the late games, and people scanned the QR code on Page 1 and read the stories (and I assume any agate). It worked. Metrics were in the thousands after a week or two.

    Do the same with baseball information. Use 10 p.m. as the cutoff and put everything up to that point in the paper then have a late/web guy (who maybe works 6 to 2) cull everything after 10 p.m. (roundups, standings, boxes, updated leaders, top 10 photos of the day) for your paper's sports blog or website. Stick a decent-sized QR code on the baseball page and direct everyone to the blog. Everyday. Train the readers and they'll use it.

    * The sports editor should plan well in advance to have print-only content for the MLB page. Want to localize? Do something with fantasy baseball leagues. You may think that's stupid but I guarantee fantasy freaks would be tripping all over themselves if they knew they were in the paper once you've figured out how to present it. Perhaps have the sports department join a local league and see what kind of content that produces. Run a national fantasy notes column a few times a week.

    * Daily MLB Baseball Card of the Day feature that you can localize.

    It's not that hard to come up with ideas.

    Just don't take away the baseball because you're too lazy to innovate.
     
  6. JBHawkEye

    JBHawkEye Well-Known Member

    Haven't killed it. And don't have any intention to do so.

    Now, we've changed it a little bit. It's not a full page most days, but we still get in all of the boxes of the games within our deadline.

    There have been rare occasions in the last few years where we haven't been able to run box scores because of space. And we get killed with calls the next morning.

    Yep, maybe those are our older readers. But they're still our readers.

    We're not sacrificing local copy. We're not sacrificing national stories. We get the things in that need to get in.
     
  7. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    "They can get it online" is silly and selective reasoning for anything, because they can get anything online.

    They can get that great local story online just as easily as the box scores, so what makes one more valuable than the other to save for print?

    To me, what you don't want to do is to drive people away because something isn't there that they expect to see. I would say a certain number do expect to see box scores and standings and whatnot.
     
  8. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    This is a very rough draft of what I'm talking about. I'll add content and clean it up throughout the day.

    http://overnightbaseball.blogspot.com/
     
  9. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    Disagree. In the pecking order of things at places I've been, Major League Baseball was pretty well down the list. It didn't make sense to sacrifice everything else, local or national, for the sake of 15 freakin' boxscores almost every day.

    Again, back in the day when the section was twice the space it was today, you could afford that luxury. Nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to justify that kind of space. Heck, EVERYTHING has been cut back as far as the print edition goes.
     
  10. HejiraHenry

    HejiraHenry Well-Known Member

    I would think so, yes.
     
  11. NEVER!!!

    Our sports pages have shrunk to 3 or 4 pages a day. SE still devotes a full page to agate (boxes, standing, transactions, leaderboards, money lists). He will consider no changes to that set up.
     
  12. SixToe

    SixToe Well-Known Member

    The value is you're placing your local folks over MLB (or pro sports). It's essentially a nice way of saying "we're committing to local" by showcasing the high school or summer leagues or whatever.

    Yeah, you can get both things online. But kids and parents or other readers remember that big story about Jimmy or Susie more than the nice layout about an MLB team sliding into first place in July.

    Agreed. If you stop doing them and don't get calls, you're on the right track. If people email and call raising hell then it might be worth reconsidering.
     
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