LA TIMES Non Coverage of local event

I keep going back to Shotty's point - if they cover it, presumably it is taking space and resources away from something else. What should go so NCAA golf should get covered?

Is it worth taking away from somerhing you know has big interest - Dodgers/Angels/Kings in the Cup finals/UCLA baseball, even - and giving it to something that is nothing more than an afterthought to 99.99 percent of your readers?

 

Then subtract the number who work for the schools or are related to the athletes.

 

Exactly.

 

Just got done reading the Times over lunch. The sports section had an Eric Sondheimer column/feature on the Southern/City Section baseball championships this weekend at Dodger Stadium along with a preview of the CIF State track meet. There's no question that both of those events carry more weight to readers in LA than college golf. What the Times was able to get using wire reports wouldn't have been significantly improved by having a reporter out staffing the event for the space they had an, as said earlier, you don't just create space in a paper out of whole cloth.

If Thomas Bonk was still at the paper, I would assume they would have sent him or at least had him devote his weekly column to it. But he's not there and the Times has been relying on the Orlando Sentinel's golf writer for their PGA Tour coverage. The fact that a paper like the Times can't find a way to have a columnist doing a once-a-week piece on local/national golf is the biggest issue here, and that's pretty old news.

 

I wasn't complaining, I was merely putting up something for discussion. I like the points that have been made so far.

 

seems to me they should be all over this, especially with USC and UCLA in the field.

 

And that wouldn't even matter.

You can name USC's No. 5 tailback quicker than you can name USC's No. 1 golfer.

(Yes, I know someone's going to look up the name of USC's No. 1 golfer. But anyways.)

 

And anyone under 35 with a smartphone.

 

Long ago when I worked in that market, I thought we and everyone else ran too much shit that very few people were going to read. The problem wasn't really solvable at the time, though, because every section was so packed with ads that you had like 20-something inside pages with heavy ad stack and you needed plenty of dinky stories to fill them. Ah, perfect spot for the NCAA water polo right here on S-16! So you could be encyclopedic and give non-revenue sports their due.

One problem now is the space has changed, and as Shotty says, something else has to go. The other problem is that now you are running less on the good stuff, and if you run too much of the crap just to make a few people happy, you increase the boring factor and turn off core sports fans. If you are running 50 stories ROP on average and 10 are not of widespread interest, that doesn't hurt you. But if you are running just 25 stories and three are not of widespread interest, readers notice what's missing and say, they don't have stories on this and this and this, yet they ran this shit on college golf. So we end up looking not just cheap but cheap and stupid.

 

Side thought: If the Kings win the Cup, does the Times restore road coverage next season?