no-person sports staff

Yeah. That's the craziest part. I don't "fill in" on a fulltime basis when the sports guy is off. Want to know why? Because I am one of two people who can operate a camera here. So I have stay on a fulltime news basis in case the city burns down.

They can't even throw me a bone those weeks he's off.

 

I thought this was about The Washington Times.

 

Could they at least let you edit it all?

 

Nope. I'm "needed" during the day. Editing is done at night. And off site. We moved all our copy editing to a sister paper about a half hour away from here.

 

I hope my publisher doesn't see this.

 

Three months? I'd say three weeks, maybe less if there's a whole bunch of calls from parents who also happen to be advertisers ...

 

not the case at this place. the only one who knows any sports is the publisher himself.

 

I'd think twice about encouraging the publisher to chip in. I was a one-man sports staff with a publisher who took on the outdoors page at my last full-time newspaper gig many years ago. He routinely failed to fill the space allotted, had a hard time putting together a well-rounded story and often ran photos of his hunting/fishing buddies.

 

The idea is nothing new. Smaller places have attempted to do this especially after football season has ended. Silly publishers and silly editors think that people don't care about basketball and baseball the same way. The problem comes when there is a stud or stud team in those sports, all of a sudden, there is a NEED for sports coverage.
Worst of all, the crap that is on the other pages isn't fit to piss on, yet sports is always the first place where they want to cut.

 

The basic problem is that everyone (particularly men) think they know sports because they watch it on TV or they played Little League. And so it'll be easy and fun (hey, you can go to the games for free!) to put out the section. After a couple months, these schmucks figure out that it's not a matter of making nachos while watching the Game of the Week and cry uncle.

 

How long before a clever parent or two realizes the lack of sports coverage and makes the "good will" gesture to "cover" games where little Johnny just happens to be playing? Or maybe said parent will befriend the lost reporter at the game and give some tips about how the game is played and who the top players on the team are (i.e. little Johnny).
Reminds me of when I was in high school. Local paper for some reason sent a non-sports person to cover my school's bad basketball team (won 4 games in a 3-year span IIRC). Team got its butt kicked that again, per usual. The reporter's story included something along the lines "the Podunk basketball team and the band were trying to outbad each other." Reporter got some angry calls over that one.

 

My former shop is trying this no-person sports dept approach right now, and from my understanding it's not going well. A lot of people are really bummed out about this, and I get calls and emails still even though I'm several hundred miles away. Honestly, it kind of bums me out because the two guys before me were quite good and we all were really embraced in a community that really cares about its sports scene.