Pages in Sections

How many pages do most papers, 50,000 and under, get on a daily basis. What about Sunday?

 

There should be a separate section from Sports. It would contain all the non-sports items that today's sportswriters deem to be worthy of Sports.

That way, those of us who just want to read about Sports could keep the Sports section and ditch the other section.

 

Most papers I have seen still have separate sports sections....

 

Right. But more and more, those sections have many non-sports items in them. The sports editor and the M.E. aren't keeping those items out. That's why we need a separate section. It could be called Speech in Sports or Language Regulation in Sports or something like that.

 

We still have our own, stand-alone section on a daily basis. Ranges from 4-5 pages on an average day, with 5-7 on Sundays. For HS, FBC and NFL weekends, it's up to 8 pages for weekend and Monday editions.

 

How much of it is truly sports?

 

We get 4 pages on Monday through Saturday (1 is devoted to agate), but it is usually paired with a business and/or weather page(s). We get our own 8-page section for Sundays.

 

Is the stuff in the Sports section actually sports?

 

Meaning?
We had news take the Pistorius trial and other things like that. Otherwise we have room to cover our 25 or so area high school, 4 D-III colleges and the pro stuff and that's it.

 

Meaning there are a lot of speech code-type things in sports that shouldn't be there. The Sterling thing was big, but a lot of the other "analysis"-type things are just lazy pieces that shouldn't be in a Sports section.

 

No. We'll run gamers and previews for sure, and then features on the weekends. But not a lot of analysis.

 

Most places I've worked were 4-6 pages on weekdays and usually 8 on weekends.

One place, I would email the exec editor and ad guys each Sunday night with a basic list of stuff I knew was coming up: games, enterprise stuff, previews, etc. It worked really well and they usually cooperated and we didn't get stuck short at times when we had a lot going on or planned something special. Likewise, when we didn't need the usual space (holiday break, summer, etc.) we'd tell them to cut back.

We didn't run a ton of analysis, preferring to use the space for game stories and features. I can see arguments both ways. One thing I am big on is consistency. If you don't believe you have adequate space to run a MLB/NHL/NBA roundup (or boxscores) every day, then don't do it just because you get some extra space one week. Drives readers nuts and creates expectations that you can't meet.