Not even a stringer? For football?

News side reporters do this all the time. Make a couple phone calls, re-write a press release, look up some background stuff on the internet, write 8 inches and slap your name on it.

Just another of my objections to these shops that run byline counts. Had that argument once and said "if you sat next to me for an eight-hour shift, you would be amazed at how much I actually do. It's not all about bylines."

 

Depends on the reader and depends on the market.

Lots of people will note a byline and they'll think the reporter was there.

Some of the insider-y things are for the benefit of insiders and that's something that gets lost in all the noise.

Freelancing also depends on the market and how important the school is to coverage.

AP has pretty much gotten out of the business of covering smaller schools in football and in basketball, only if they're ranked.

So Sacramento or Paducah may hire a stringer for UC Davis or Murray State because that coverage has been deemed important by readers but for the vast middle and bottom of college athletics, most people don't give a shit.

They may want to see a score but that's about it.

if you're really a fan of mid- or small-major or DII and below, you're probably getting your information directly from the school.

 

I'm totally with you on that. When our publisher started putting an emphasis on this, reporters started taking the most miniscule press releases, doing a rewrite and trying to slap a byline on it. It completely diminished the quality of the product we were putting out.
After a while, the news editor and copy desk chief basically said enough. No more bylines except for actually original work. And basically they just took a stand and said if the reporters are working their butts off, even if it's just rewrites, taking calls, etc...and they aren't getting the bylines, the editors will go to bat for you if the publisher says anything. They did. And I give the publisher credit for backing down from the initial emphasis, realizing the difference.

 

We don't cover a DI school at my paper, but we cover its road games in a similar fashion, only we arrange to talk with the coach over the phone after the game to add fresh quotes to it.

 

Maybe you spend 2-3 hours calculating and typing in statistical leaders that run as part of your weekly prep package. Or typing in the next month's competition schedule to run in the calendar, or the television and radio listings. Or writing up 10 prep gamers (plus agate) for a roundup of games you didn't staff. Or retyping press releases (back in the days of fax machines). Or filing out required slips for the photo editor for the coming week, so you can actually get some local art shot for your pages before advertising and lifestyle steals all the photographers' work hours.

I used to spend several hours per week editing and putting together our weekly Community Sports page (youth leagues, marathons, triathlons, power lifting competitions, etc.). Much of the submitted material was poorly written and demanded much more than copy and paste editing to be readable.

Point is.... byline counts are a superficial and usually inaccurate way to measure employee productivity.

 

Do you put a byline and a dateline on it?

 

At my shop, if we make a call to get a coach/fresh quotes for a road game, we would do byline but no dateline. If we use the gamesheet/stats only, no byline.

 

I hear your concerns, and it's silly to think a newspaper would go out of its way to save, what, $700 a year on its biggest hometown beat? If it's a step back from how they've covered the school on the road, it's disappointing, if unsurprising these days.

I don't know that an FCS ranking carries that much weight. Your school drew 6,500 for last home game. I'm sure paper will tell you the average reader barely notices difference between a stringer with dateline and a staff story cobbled together from online scoreboard and postgame radio.

I think it's reasonable to write the sports editor and say how much you appreciated when paper invested in someone on site who could write a detailed, colorful game story for its readers.

 

Get some fans and alums to write that letter.

When I was an SID, our D-I basketball coach threatened to sue the newspaper if they didn't provide better coverage of the team. Team had been dreadful for 4-5 years and was finally having a winning season, close to selling out our 5,000-seat bandbox gym. Big news in his world. I tried several times to explain how newspapers worked, what a sports editor has to juggle and why they did what they did (I considered the coverage more than acceptable). Coach didn't get it. Oh, well, thankfully he was too busy to file a suit.

Two years later, when the NCAA started investigating the program, he wasn't banging the drums for more intensive coverage.

 

A personal illustration how different papers in different communities treat programs differently.....

Worked two years at paper A, which had an NAIA football team in the community. Scheduling was hard for them, so they normally had 3-4 home games and 6-7 road games per season. I think average attendance was around 1,500. We'd do 1-2 home games per year on the cover with a photo. Road games were normally me typing a boxscore and writing 8-10 paragraphs of play-by-play on an inside page. No one seemed to make much of a fuss.

Moved 1,000 miles to another, slightly smaller (but comparable) city with another NAIA football team at paper B. Team had been successful and was the toast of the town, but still around 2,000-3,000 average home attendance. Sports editor staffed every game, home and away. Did a 12-16-page Gameday tab every week, which served as the school's program on home game days (we also did the tab for road games). Game day got a 35-inch game story, 15-inch sidebar, players of the game, grading the team (offense, defense, special teams, etc). Half the front page, entire back page of an 8-page section. 4-5 photos by our staff photog, who also traveled to every game. It was like we were covering Alabama or Ohio State. I did a real nice job of packaging the stuff, but every week thought "My God, this is terribly overdone for an NAIA school with 2,000 students."

So, on a four-person staff, our main guy did little else but NAIA football all week every week from late August to December. Understandably, other stuff got short-changed and he got seriously burned out. It seemed management was in bed with people from the university, who wanted us to play the team for far, far more than I figured it deserved.

Just an example of how two similar-sized papers had vastly different approaches to coverage.

 

Just to play Devil's Advocate, it may be the biggest "hometown beat," but that could still rank pretty far down the list of the papers' priorities, and the readers' priorities.

If you're talking football with Florida State, Florida, Central Florida and Miami, NASCAR, the Rays in the playoffs, the Buccaneers and Dolphins, high school sports, etc., even if a lot of that stuff is wire, what percent of the readers are plowing past that stuff to get to Bethune-Cookman football? I don't know the market, so maybe that is the case. But the distinction between "local" and "local interest" is a pretty important one, IMO.

Yes, it would have been nice to travel to the game, or line up a stringer. But there was a story on it, with multiple people quoted, and I'd bet with some certainty that a majority of the readers won't know the difference or really care that much.

 

News siders haven't a clue what you sports people do. Their thought is if you don't get into the office til 4, you're lazy and worthless.