Local Content vs. National Content

Makes sense, especially this time of year. I could certainly see papers in Texas or Arizona playing up a Mexico match, or papers in Minnesota or New Hampshire giving some extra play to Canadian accomplishments during the Winter Olympics.
There's an SEC team that's not in our state but has a significant fanbase around us. I have no problem treating them as one of our own state teams and putting them out front on occasion.
It all goes back to knowing your market.

 

For quite a while, Notre Dame was looked upon that way throughout the country.

 

Very rarely do Minnesota papers give space to Canadian stories during Olympics like that.

Maybe extreme northern Minnesota, but that's about it. And I even doubt that they would do it in most towns. The closest MN daily newspaper to the Canadian border is roughly 100 miles away, and all of them are sub-10,000 circulation.

The closest daily that might do it would be the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, but that's still 80 miles from the border.

 

Our community has quite a few folks with Mexican and Portuguese roots, but there's a significant Philipino population as well, so I'll give the runup to a Manny Pacquiao fight play over, say, a routine HBO or Showtime card.

 

Was really just rattling off border states. The Canadian border is rural enough, or there's enough geographic separation with the lakes, that you're right in that there probably aren't many papers of note who would service both sides.
The southern border is an entirely different deal. There's cities there where I'd safely wager more people speak Spanish than English. If the papers in El Paso, Brownsville, Tucson and Laredo weren't treating Mexican games with the same fervor or more as the U.S. games, they're not very smart.

 

All things being equal, we'll give a little extra run to Notre Dame in our pages - just because Jarious Jackson was a QB there in the late 1990s and some Tupelo folks will never forget.

 

I did in both Washington state and Montana.

 

I've always shot for at least one local item a day, even if its just a release from the local D-2 school, a 6" roundup of submitted Little League results or whatever.

I like to think of my section like a dinner plate, and I like to keep things balanced, but I also know that I'm the one who has to tell my boss, the ME, if I have no local art for him to skybox. He's a former SE and aware of the extremely cyclical nature of our sports season (our winters are busier than the rest of our regional group because high school hockey is a major presence, and our summers are worse than the rest of our regional group). I also know he is required to count and report to his boss and to corporate the number of bylines each staffer in both sections had during the preceding month.

 

I know your ME understands the cyclical nature of sports, but I sometimes wonder if the people above them do. Our place tracks bylines, too, and it's always a fear in the back of my mind that they'll look at a slow week in a vacuum, instead of taking a step back and seeing the whole picture.
Yes, I only wrote two stories last week. It wasn't my best week and I'm not especially proud of it. But I also wrote 15 stories and worked four or five desk shifts nearly every week during the spring. Over 52 weeks, it generally evens out. Everybody has good weeks and bad.