Sports Travel. Seriously.

This isn't that complicated. If you've got a college/pro team in your town, you've gotta travel. If you take AP, then you've got nothing different for pregame, game day and follow-up coverage than any of the other papers whose readers care about the same team.

In this business, as with any other, the way to survive and thrive is to do what you can do better than anybody else in the world -- and DO it better than anybody else in the world. That'll keep your readers dialed in.

There are plenty of strategic reasons to travel -- credibility with readers, credibility with sources, quality and quantity. A huge one now is the Internet ... a paper covering a college team can reach alums worldwide. Can't separate yourself there using AP.

 

I'll be another to vouch for a shitty relations dept. where the coach is only available after games, at a weekly conference and once a week after practice. Shitty.

 

That's probably as much a shitty coach as it is a shitty SID staff, right?

 

Some Guy's situation (and that of Diabeetus) sounds like my coach and SID from 2000-2004. It could also be the same SID and the next coach if not for the latter's 30-minute sitdown with us on Sundays. The rest? Identical.

 

I'd also tell a paper's department that books travel to be on the lookout for deals. Ya, you might not get good short-notice rates on flights, but check Hotwire... most major cities have great rates on hotels that are way below what you'd ordinarily pay.

Granted, this was Little League... but I followed a team of ours that reached the Junior League World Series. I thought for sure we'd follow it from home. Imagine my shock when SE says "you're going to Louisville". He says to look for a decent hotel, not too expensive, etc., keep receipts for what I eat and what I spend and I'd get reimbursed.

Go on Hotwire, find a 2-star property for $26 a night... turns out to be a Candlewood Suites about one mile east of where all the fields are.

You won't find bargains like that all the time, but instead of saying "I gotta have a Marriott at $179 a night", maybe you'd find a Hyatt at $89 with Hotwire. (And no, I don't own stock in or work for the company.)

 

I've done it many times myself traveling on my spring baseball trips. Stayed in Sheratons, Embassy Suites, Omnis, Hyatts, Hiltons... all at rates way off what you'd normally pay. It's worth it if you do the research.

 

Outing alert: Joe Williams works for the Sacramento Bee.

;D

I took from his original post that in some cases, cutting travel would be worth considering if it would save a job or two on the desk or among writers. And in a different world, this would be a scenario that happens.

But travel gets cut first. Then jobs get cut. Cutting one does not prevent whacking the other.

I believe in travel at all levels, including high school when worthwhile. And yeah, I think MLS and NHL beat jockeys should be able to travel as well.

Of course, we're not discussing this in a vacuum. Beat writers should and must travel, yes. The question is, how much longer will the bean counters at news outlets see travel as a worthwhile expense?

 

that is saying, a lot.

 

Why is it so hard to grasp the possibility of this being done on a case-by-case situation, rather than all-or-nothing regarding road games? So fine, you don't pull off the road for all 41 NBA games or 81 MLB games. But you start dropping the single game trip to Atlanta, when it's the second of back-to-backers and the airfare is $650. Or you skip the three-game series in Pittsburgh, and line up a freelancer who gets fully briefed by the assistant sports editor or even the beat person. Then that freelancer hits all the deadlines you give him, files notes, etc.

Sure, it wouldn't be as thorough as your own person. But you've just saved $1200 and three days of your staffer's pay.

My hunch still is that we'll soon see more of this, from late in the season with lousy teams (a long tradition of pulling off the road at many papers) to isolated in-and-out games in the middle of the season to certain games and trips identified from the very start, as soon as the schedule is released. Then sports editors will get more accustomed to offering up their people as "freelance" options to their buddies in the other markets. Then it will become a trade-out situation, where the staffer gets assigned to that duty (cover the road team and file to that market's paper), with the savings in travel expenses used to justify the practice to upper management.

Maybe certain papers, with certain beats, will never pull off the road. Perhaps NFL teams will always get beat-writer coverage, no matter how pricey the travel. But when you've got newsroom managers removing bottled water and scrimping on mileage rates for personal auto use, you've got to believe that the bean counters will do a costs/benefits breakdown of staffing 100 percent of the road games. And "benefits" always is subjective, when you start talking about quality of coverage or the stories you think you "might" be able to get vs. that freelancer.

 

steveu, when you've saved money through Priceline or Hotwire has anyone in your management structure ever said, "Hey, great job. We appreciate you staying at the Candlewood for $38 a night instead of the Marriott for $154 a night. That might help us with another trip or two down the road."

Do your managers play off travel cuts against each other? We can do this trip if we don't go on that one or this single-game roadie to Atlanta?

Being appreciated for trying to make the effort, and showing you've saved some dough, sometimes helps as much as the actual savings if you have good managers.

 

Yeah, probably. I'd just rather blame the SIDs. There's a prevailing theory around that place that they don't need us, that we have the propensity to do more harm than good. Which is probably true. They can post fluff news and positive features on their website. The only thing we provide is coverage of the negative stuff, in their minds. Three things can happen when you let the press do their jobs, and two of them are bad. Or something like that.

 

No. In fact, once I booked off hotels.com and had a hell of a time being reimbursed because the paper demanded a receipt from the actual hotel, and the hotel couldn't give me one because the money went through hotels.com. So I said, fine, I'll spend more money next time and you'll get your precious receipt straight from the hotel.