LA TIMES Non Coverage of local event

Partial. Go to the division games and maybe some marquee regular season games.

I've always thought these all-expense paid trips for beat writers were an enormous waste of money.

At my last shop, my had a junior team win a national hockey championship. (Junior and minor-league are about as big as it ever gets there. Town is far too small for pro teams.) They wouldn't send me or even let me go on my own dime. I did watch the games online and wrote as good of stories as I could had I been there in person. So I guess they were right. Lesson learned.

 

But the dateline! All people really care about is the dateline!

 

If you can't report or write a better story in person, a career change may be in order.

 

I got out shortly thereafter. Just got tired of dealing with the stuff and that was sort of the final straw in a long list of things.

As for the story, it was a little harder... a lot of phone interviews and such. We all know the suits long ago ceased to care about that.

But watching a game in person for me is actually less than watching online or on TV. A friend offered me tickets to an NFL game... I thought about it and when I thought about the parking, the traffic, the seats, the concessions, the climate, the crowds, etc., I soon realized I'm far more comfortable watching on TV.

 

Even in a perfect world, I don't see covering it. Very, very, very, very few people care. And what percentage of those are readers?

 

So many writers mail in their game stories. They get there and load up on about three servings of food, for one thing. Good luck keeping a sharp eye when you're tucking in for an afternoon nap.

 

Soooo easy to write a game story off the boxscore. Have to get something in there that shows you were actually there. Barely room for that kind of detail or color anymore.

 

Oh my god, this.

 

What are you writing? A 8-inch gamer?

 

With today's shrinking newsholes, 8-inch gamers are becoming the norm.

Look, we'd all like to do things the way we believe they should be done. That's why I got up a 7 am after working on desk til midnight the previous night in order to go cover an event in person, when someone else might have phoned it in or gone out at 1 p.m. I felt like I needed to be there. I didn't bill for overtime or anything else. It was just part of covering an event on my beat and I wanted to do what I felt was the right way.

Now, when money and/or major travel get involved, sometimes you don't always get to do things the way you prefer. Some papers don't send pro beat writers on road trips. I understand that. It's a money issue.

So, let's say the coach gets fired in the middle of a road trip that you aren't staffing. You do the best you can with what you have.... then explain to management how you could have done better in person.

 

I just covered this event. The only media outlets there were two national golf magazines, a staff writer for the Austin paper (Texas eventually won the event), a former Orange County register writer who was stringing for the AP and NCAA.com, and the Longhorn Network. Of course it was strange not to have the LA dailies out there, though it served as another sign-of-the-times moment.

 

It surely doesn't seem like a major expense for the Times to have a semi-regular stringer doing a local golf column. There are a few people who play golf in Southern California. And this is the sort of event such a stringer would cover. Cost control is one thing. Sheer laziness justified as cost control is another.