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

Well, Sports Illustrated doesn't highlight its print content on its website. That's intentional. Thompson draws a lot of clicks on ESPN.com. Many of The New York Times' Sunday sports takeouts rank among the most e-mailed stories on the site. But here's what ESPN.com and NYTimes.com do: They promote the hell out of the stories and promote them well, even at the expense of some readers' clicks. They know there are many readers who don't care about cricket and won't ever care about cricket, even if the headline is "Why You Should Care About Cricket." But they sacrifice that in order to provide other readers with a unique experience. ESPN.com is the long-form capital of the sports media. The site knows it will bring back those looking for box scores and breaking news because it does those things better than the competition and has the basic promotion of being ESPN, so it can afford the luxury of promoting its smarter work. That especially rings true in a story that also works to create interest in something ESPN's invested in, which is why you see things like that cricket story popping up right before ESPN broadcasts major international cricket.

 

People don't read game stories. They look at the box scores. Has anyone noticed that the box scores on the website get 100x as many hits as the game stories?

 

I'll bet it's the opposite of the Web in a newspaper.

Re: orginal post

My paper still can blow it out and we have some writers who do it well. I'm glad we do it, just to demonstrate we still have muscle. But I don't think they do us much tangible good.

 

Just in case anyone is curious, the cricket story Wright did was, I believe, the most read thing on ESPN.com last year. And it was 13,000 words.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for that (2 billion people in India for, one) but that's a case of time and space investment paying off.

 

Whatever.

No one cares about cricket. It was obviously just you and your boys - and a bunch of those Missouri people - clicking again and again and again and again . . .

 

This ties in directly with the continued rise of fantasy sports.

 

#postsfrom2007

Simon, that's very true of your site but almost entirely not true for local newspapers. Why? Because people go to national sports sites for box scores. Their box scores are better designed and more wieldy.

There's also the matter of promotion. Your site and its competitors integrate box scores well. You have links out of your centerpieces. Very few newspaper websites do this. It's stupid on their part, maybe, but it's also partially because no one would choose their box scores over ESPN.com or the other national sites.

 

I wrote a long take out story about two years ago. I spent about three months doing research and interviews and scrounging up photos. I turned in an 70-80-inch story with about a dozen photos.
It is probably my best work.
It was well-read and I got a lot of compliments on it. Damned if I know how.
The story was crammed on a page with one - ONE! - photo that was blown up to what amounted to a four column headshot. And GOD did it look awful!
That's it. The desker never bothered to use any of the other photos.
And it looked like shit.