no box scores

The last 10 games . . . home/road . . . that's the gamblers, talkilng.

But make no mistake. Gamblers buy papers.

 

This is fundamentally correct, but what's implied in the message ("Hyper-local is the way to survive") isn't entirely accurate. The Hometown Newspaper is far better positioned than ESPN.com, etc., to deliver news on the local D-3 colleges and preps, but local competition is ramping up steadily. The local TV/cable news stations and independent web sites are getting steadily better and have the same ability as newspapers to collaborate with MaxPreps, etc., to win audience share.

Newspapers that get complacent and aren't constantly finding better ways to present their content in print and online remain at risk for being overrun by the competition.

 

pressmurphy,
I don't know about your area, but the Max Preps coverage of a local team in my area consists of just a score -- sometimes. If people want actual info on high school sports, the paper (and hopefully that paper's Web site) is where they go.
Sure are sports discussion sites, but the topics usually quickly turn into "Your team sucks" posting contests.
Now, those kind of Web sites have their place and their fun to read when things get interesting. But the paper (and by extension, its Web site) is still the best place to get the info.

 

Yeah, a lot of the data on our local schools is also incomplete. But keep a few things in mind:

(1) MaxPreps, HighSchoolSports.net, etc., rely heavily on representatives of the individual schools to do the data entry. That's like getting free labor.

By comparison, the only thing that users on most newspaper sites can upload is photos, which aren't "content" in the truest sense of the word when it comes to searchable information. That drives the local track and field guys nuts because about 80 percent of their major meets are administrated electronically with Hy-Tek or other software and they are unable to get it published on the newspaper's site. Conversely, I've been able to recode those results and re-post them on the site I run in 90 seconds or less.

(2) MaxPreps and the other results aggregators are still in their infancy, especially compared to newspapers that have been doing this forever. There will be competition (and consolidation) among themselves that will push the quality higher but also thin the herd.

(3) One definite downside of MaxPreps is the very limited number of sports they handle. Part of it is scale -- there must be 10,000 high schools across the country and there are something like 30 sports. They're just not staffed with hardware and manpower to handle everything, which puts them at risk of alienating folks in a lot of unrepresented sports (cross country, swimming, tennis. etc.). The bad news is that a lot of newspapers are guilty of the same thing.

(4) If I had a spare $1 million for research and development, I'd roll out an application that allows coaches and ADs to submit their schedules and results to all the sites at once. As it is now, they have to log in to each site individually and work with very different interfaces, which is very inefficient.

I suspect a lot of schools and leagues have already decided that MaxPreps or one of the others is their "official" site, and entering info on any of the other sites is optional. Again, that plays into the hand of newspapers for now, since they're better at the "paper of record" concept in most cases.