Smallest paper you've seen with major sports beat writers?

I'll soon be applying for a job at a community daily with a circulation of 27,000 that I was pretty surprised to find out has beat writers covering its nearby NFL and MLB teams. I think they might even have more than one guy covering MLB. This struck me as an incredibly small paper to have beat writers on multiple major sports. What's the smallest you've encountered?

 

Things have changed since, they don't do it anymore and haven't in at least 15 years. But my first paper had 17K circ and staffed home games for NFL, MLB and NBA, although we all covered preps and/or worked the desk in between and during off-seasons.

 

The Daily Southtown used to travel with the Cubs, White Sox and Bears and staff Hawks and Bulls home games.

I don't think they do it any more, though.

 

My paper is 25K circulation and has beat writers for the two big state colleges and the local small school. We staff every football game, home and road, most home basketball games and all postseason basketball and baseball games. We only fool with the other sports if they have a prominent local kid on the roster.

There are at least two other papers our size in the state that do the same thing. Not sure how out-of-the-ordinary this is.

 

15k daily, home and road for local D-1 men's hoops and NFL, home only for NHL. (Football and hockey teams are 70 miles away.)

With just three full-timers, I have no idea how they make it work, other than a mind-numbing number of hours per man per week.

 

The Capital Times was just a tad over 16,000 and had separate beat writers for Wisconsin football, men's basketball, women's basketball and men's hockey. Also, there was a regular Packers writer (not on staff, but strung for pretty much all the coverage) and the preps guy covered Brewers home games.

In less than a month, the paper will be going online and it will be pretty much the same.

 

At one of my digs (one that I've commented on repeatedly when asked), we covered UCLA and USC home and selected away games, staffed the Super Bowl and most of the home Dodgers and Lakers games.

Our circulation was around 40-45k, but we're in a commuter's paradise, where 85% of the population didn't live there in 1980 (most came from the LA Basin), so survey after survey showed that they didn't care about local sports, but cared greatly about the Dodgers/Lakers/Kings/UCLA/USC.

We did a great job covering both our backyard and the big stuff down below.

 

When the Birmingham Post-Herald closed and its full-time Alabama and Auburn beat writers were tossed into the street by Scripps, the paper had a circulation of about 5,500/

 

Long time reader of the board, first time poster. Guess for O&A fans you could say I've been "lingering longer"

Anyways. I know of a paper in my state that covers the major university home and away for football, has a circ of maybe 16K. And they've done it for years.

They do some college basketball too, but not much.

 

My first paper was at about 45,000 but dropped to about 30,000 over the years. We covered Dodgers, Lakers, Rams home and road. Kings, home and some road. College home but we didn't publish on Sundays so that was OK.

 

Wow! It may have been a small paper, but it had a great sports section.