LA TIMES Non Coverage of local event

Ok, I would like others opinion on this: The Men's Division I Golf Championships are at Riviera Country Club this week and The LA Times is not covering it. The course is about 30 minutes from the office. There are two local teams USC and UCLA in it and individual golfers from Long Beach State and Pepperdine, two other local colleges. The Daily News isn't here either, but they have two of their four writers covering the Kings so I get that.
It is mystifying to me why they aren't there. Lakers and Clippers are gone from playoffs, so you can't really make the argument about not enough space. Anyone have any theories on this? Is it not as important as I think it is? I eagerly await the responses.

 

Maybe they have cut so many positions they don't have enough bodies.

Outside of football and basketball --- and perhaps baseball and hockey in certain spots --- college sports has never gotten a great deal of ink except in smaller college towns. But I've seen byline stories on events like that before --- normally 12 inches on page 6. So I'm wondering if it is just a manpower issue.

 

Of course nobody cares about college golf. That's true. But 10-12 on page 6 for an NCAA championship involving that many locals in an event that I'd assume is loaded with PGA hopefuls is not an unreasonable expectation.

 

Hell ... we're covering the heck out of it 3,000 miles away because we have three local teams in the event. All staff reports, but it's getting ink in our paper.

 

Most sports sections get extra space when local teams are in the playoffs. I imagine the paper had an extra page or two added for Lakers and Clippers coverage that simply goes away when the teams are eliminated. (The Kings are in the Stanley Cup finals, so they get extra space too.)

For me, it's hard to say this isn't enough: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-0531-newswire-20120531,0,3539885.story

 

Agreed. This is the sort of event a big-city paper covers if they want to be the paper of record. But with staff and page cuts, papers cease to become the paper of record.

 

Big city, small city, you do what you can to serve readers' interest. "Just because its here" or "we've always covered it" is not a reason to cover it. For example, the last couple of years the state high school girls wrestling championships have been in a nearby town. A big deal to a lot of folks, agreed. But we didn't have any entries from our area and it's smack dab in the middle of the first week of basketball playoffs. So I send out the shooter to get a photo package for a first-day centerpiece, try to honor as many requests as possible for photos from other papers in our company, refer the rest to a local freelancer who once worked for us, and we go about covering the heck out of hoops.

 

Does the Times still have a golf writer? If so, there should be at least one staff story on the tournament. But it's possible there still will be one if the event isn't over. If I was an editor with limited staff/space, I'd pick the last day of a tournament to cover if that's all that was feasible.

 

Hans,

I agree to an extent. But if your city is hosting an event as big as an NCAA national championship --- even in an Olympic sport --- doesn't it stand to reason a certain number of readers will be interested. I remember times in the past reading about some event coming to town that I may not have otherwise known about and decided "that would be fun to go watch".

 

I'd write college golfers work just as hard as other athletes, but we all know it's not true.

 

Now, they'll get more hits on their site from folks, here, trying to prove/disprove their lack of coverage than they would have if they had actually covered it.