SID stories on the front page

Don't ever pick up the local paper after they moved to three days a week. But I know the guy who covers the local college does very little work. I looked at the local college page on the paper's website. There are 15 articles listed - 10 by the SID, 4 by the guy they call the beat writer and 1 by another staff writer. I would be ashamed if I was the beat writer.

 

And in an odd twist, the guy who was off on Saturday wrote a story in today's edition about what a great crowd was at the home game the paper didn't staff.

 

I'd credit it by name, unless ordered otherwise.

If the readers read an absolutely fawning puff piece, they should know if it was written by the SID or the paper's staff writer.

And the readers should know when the paper's too cheap to staff events in person. Probably 95% of the readership won't care, but 5% will.

 

I've tried to tell the guys on our desk to never give an SID a byline. I am also trying to instill in them that a lot of SIDs don't even know how to write. If all we have is something that came from and SID, we need to rewrite it and clean it up. If we need to put the local college on the cover and we don't have anyone to staff the game (or the team is out of town), we just write off of the boxscore.

 

In my six years as an SID, I got a byline (that I didn't ask for) once. We were hosting an NCAA regional golf tournament, and I did pretty much all the work for the reporter, compiling information on the teams and players coming in. (It was a LOT of work, but it was part of my job; I'm not complaining, just sayin'.) And when the package ran in the paper the day of or day before the tournament, I had a co-byline with the golf writer. Totally unexpected.

And...some SIDs can write. Pretty much every game story I sent in ran just like I wrote it. I didn't write from a homer's point of view. I wrote it from the POV of the hometown paper, concentrating on our team and players. But most everything I sent in ran verbatim. I had a really good working relationship with that paper.

Oh, I did get bylines when I strung high school football on Friday nights, but those were bylines that I earned.

 

The point of giving SIDs credit isn't about credit. It's about blame.

 

This. Unless you have an SID of the quality that I've rarely encountered, you rewrite what they send, supplement with stuff from the box score and use a staff and/or wire report byline. I don't think I've come across a college news release that could run on our cover as is.

 

Gee, thanks BDC99.

Now put yourselves over here on the dark side: We had a road game last Saturday and there was no local media. I'm thinking to myself "why do we even bother to do game notes anymore?"

And here's another story -- I had the Baylor-Michigan State women's game in Orlando over Christmas break for AP. Two top 25 teams and I was the only media there not affiliated when any school. Just saying.

 

In reference to "blame" above, I don't mean that the SID copy is going to be necessarily awful (some is, some isn't), but that it usually tends to be unusually loving toward the home team (entirely understandable).

 

As issues to get worked up over, this is WAY down the list. If it merits an appearance on the Sports front and you can't staff it or the wire isn't covering it, then there is no problem at all using an SID-written story. As it happens, one of the junior colleges we cover employs a former sports editor as its SID, and when he writes a decent feature or gamer, we give him a byline. And I guarantee there aren't 10 readers in our coverage area who care, one way or another.

 

If it merits being on the front, it merits finding someone to cover it. If you won't assign someone to cover it, it wasn't that important in the first place.

 

We've had this issue happen a couple times a year, usually when all the sports collide like football and men's and women's basketball in November and December, and then in March with men's and women's basketball and college baseball along with all the high school playoffs and crap going on.

We NEVER give an SID a byline. We clean up their copy, rewrite it, take all the homerism out, and place "staff reports" on it. Seems to work well.