Should the 30 for 30 series send a message to newspaper editors?

Lots of good commentary here about the pros and cons of longer features.

I'll add this, from a copy desker/layout perspective: if there isn't enough news hole available to present the story well, a lot of time and effort is wasted.

Case in point: many smaller shops (like ours) crank out a player profile or feature on prep athletes for the Tuesday sports section. Not much local events happening on Monday, can write them in advance, get good art, etc.

Well, lately our Tuesday news hole in all sections has shrank to almost nil, so we've had room for only one photo (on the sports cover) and are cramming the hell out of the jump page.

With 30-for-30, obviously that's not an issue, because ESPN has endless amounts of "space" to present and promote their stories. (And they certainly use it)

 

I guess my question is - and this is the issue I think that's facing my former paper - whether having the two-day old gamer is worth putting in the paper over a notebook or some sort of "game analysis" piece, etc. The paper will in no way be able to have next-day coverage of prep hoops games this year. 8:30 deadline on Tuesdays, 9 p.m. otherwise. No chance. Same for baseball once they switch to night games. I don't know the numbers - other than the incredibly shrinking circulation - on how quickly written or two-day-old gamers go over versus other content.

 

What if I told you, I agree with this? What if I told you, I also agree with the earlier take that this would not work for print?

 

Well, like I said, in some situations features or featurized gamers, at the very least, make sense. Yours falls into that category. If your game story isn't running until two days later, of course you ought to do something different with it. Find a way to featurize it, spin into a trend piece or preview for the next game, something like that.
Guess I should've been clearer. I was speaking more to a general line of thought in sports journalism that gamers -- and games -- in general are irrelevant.

 

This was well done, dickhead. Tipping my cap.

 

Lugnuts is The One?

Actually, that makes sense.

 

Word-for-word, Batman, I could have written this myself. We all understand the business has changed, scores are on Twitter, game stories are from a bygone era, blah, blah, blah. Except that when you're at a place where preps are the top priority, none of that shit is valid, because your shop is one of the only places -- perhaps THE only place -- where people can get coverage of the local prep teams.

I've worked in places that took the "gamers are passe" approach, and all it did was generate a lot of poor response from readers. And you can sit there with your high journalistic ideals and tell them, "but we're trying to appeal to the broadest number of people we can," until you're blue in the face, but the reality is the "broader community" in many cases doesn't give a rat's ass about high school sports. And the ones who do ... guess what? They want to read about what happened. They want their team to come off sounding like a bunch of heroes and they want to read something that validates what they saw.

Hey, guess what ... you don't have to like covering prep sports, but if it's what you cover and you're doing it anyplace where the circulation is less than 50,000, this is your world. You'd be better off getting used to it rather than fighting the good fight and pissing off your readers. I'm not saying don't do features. You have to do them ... you need to do them, for the quality of your section and your development as a writer. But don't force them. Don't over-think everything. Sometimes the best story to do is the obvious one that everyone is talking about -- the big game of the week. Sometimes you just have to write what you've got.

 

Not a problem. Those answers won't be in the paper but we'll be addressing them on Twitter, in the blog on a web story and on the post-game videos we do now.

 

And how much revenue is your news organization getting from those methods??

 

Or they can get those answers, but the reader has already seen it on SportsCenter before the edition arrives on their doorstep.

 

I don't watch SportsCenter much, but isn't it all homers, dunks and TDs?? There's very little WHY in its report.

 

Agreed. It is depressing to see the number of hits and interest for idiotic topics, a photo gallery or a "Ten Things That Will Do Something For You!" post than a feature or story that took some time to produce.

Readers and viewers say they want quality but it seems the majority of the time they don't appear to want it or appreciate it.