Tampa Trib apparently makes deal with Tallahassee paper for FSU coverage

School of Communications, then. Same deal. Lots of schools don't have J-schools yet somehow manage to produce quality journalists.

 

When I was looking at schools, I was interested in FSU. I got a nice phone call from an admissions officer (or someone like that, I don't remember) and one of the first questions was what field I wanted to get into. I said I was interested in journalism and she actually told me that if that was the case, I shouldn't go to FSU. End of phone call and no application sent. I

I always appreciated the honesty.

 

you can't make this shit up.

Tribune using Democrat stories...wow.

 

When the Gators were going 8-5 under Zook for three years, their coverage didn't drop off a bit.

 

Whatever the Tampa Trib decides financially. It's nothing new for Gannett papers to be financially contracted for beat-writing packages.

 

I hate to take the Tribune's side of it, especially the way they handled Scott, but I always thought it odd that a paper that has a BCS school in the city limits would have a beat writer at other D-I schools in the same state. To me, it would be like have a beat writer on the Bucs, Dolphins and Jaguars.

Well, sort of like -- I fully understand college is a different animal. There are a lot of Gator fans and Seminole fans in the Tampa area, and the Tribune better service those readers. The question is, what is the best way.

Remember, the Tribune had an FSU beat writer before USF was a football school. You have to admit that when USF added football and grew into a BCS conference, it is putting more strain on the paper's resources. The Tribune probably should have looked into this kind of arrangement before sending Scott up there.

It is an interesting question to put out there. How many major metro papers that have a major D-I program in the same city, have college beat writers at other schools around the state?

At least at a time when the Tribune is supposed to be going ''hyper local'' it is remembering that it needs to get FSU coverage in its paper.

 

But if Tampa hires a stringer, that person can go out of his way to find stories that have a local angle for the Tribune. Will the Tallahassee people who now cover the team for their own paper do that? I wouldn't count on it.

 

On the positive side, it guess it give the Florida State beat writer for the Tallahassee Democrat more job security.

 

I don't know if it gives the individual job security. As we've seen, newspapers have no problem laying off an experienced person while keeping the beat and simply moving an inexperienced person on the beat.

If there is one beat, however, that will always be staff as long as there is a Tallahassee Democrat, it is the FSU beat.

 

That just flat doesn't work in college sports. In SEC country alone under your plan, New Orleans wouldn't cover LSU, Birmingham (and soon Mobile) wouldn't do Bama or Auburn, Orlando and Miami would join Tampa in dropping FSU and Florida, Atlanta would drop UGA, Nashville and Memphis would forfeit UT and Louisville would cease covering Kentucky. At that point, you'd be making the Civil War look like a dispute over a parking space.

 

That's why I asked the question on how many papers with a major D-I program in their city staff other colleges.

I certainly understand that that the other colleges certainly need coverage and in the best case, it would be by a staffer. But it is also a fair question, when trying to figure out use increasingly scarce resources, on how is the best way to cover the other schools.

For the Tribune, for example, maybe you have a USF writer and instead of a Gators and Seminoles writer, you have a state writer that is supplemented by other sources. I'm not saying they should do that, just throwing out ideas. I think what the readers care about first is getting the information. If you're still giving them the news, sometimes it doesn't matter who is giving it to them. The key is trying to figure out what those cases are. I don't know the answer.

In the best case scenario, the Tribune and other newspapers could put staffers at all the places they think there is reader interest. But this isn't the best-case scenario, so now we have to rethink our priorities.