LA Times SE discusses what they cover

The more I think about it, the more this graf bugs me:

I’d love to be able to have a much greater presence on high school sports as well -- we have more than 600 schools in our readership area. But that takes a substantial staff that we just don’t have now. And it takes a great deal of room in a shrinking Sports section.


So ... isn't that an untapped market for, you know, some sort of new media approach? And then maybe the very best stuff gets piped back into the dead-tree product?

 

http://espn.go.com/blog/los-angeles/preps
Some shameless self-promotion and an examples of a new media approach to covering high schools in Los Angeles.

 

Some folks in the Long Beach market have stepped in, this site is over a year old.

Very small niche, basically the Moore League and Long Beach State sports. But they KILL it.

http://www.lbpost.com/sports

Nature abhors a vacuum. What the Times abdicates, someone else, whether its espnla, or more localized, will step in.

 

Look in the stands for the vast majority of games.

Now, tell me what the papers should do.

 

Given all the high schools in the area. the high school coverage was NEVER that great at the Times. That's not really even a knock; the people who covered preps were fine, and they got their little moments. But the Mighty L.A. Times of 10 years ago couldn't really cover all high schools the way some would think or they would have had 12 pages of preps every day. So they picked their spots (as noted on here before, the OC and Valley editions in their heydays were something else altogether).

So it's not like others are rushing in to fill a hole that suddenly appeared. Anybody who wanted to cover preps extensively always had an opening there -- they just didn't have the Internet to do it.

The ESPN blog is interesting, but it isn't a be-all, end-all either. It has some nice coverage of some limited things, and I applaud the effort.

Maybe Southern California high schools are simply too big of an entity for anybody to cover completely, and niches can be filled by a number of enterprising people -- if they can figure out how to make a living doing it.