wanting to revamp a section

If you're still using resources to cover games at night for the Web, where do the resources to fill the paper/news hole come from? I like this in theory but I don't have the resources to do both, thus the gamers go in the paper.

 

This is good stuff. Thanks...and carry on.

 

I agree with Frank and Mark, you have to be smart about doing features stories when you're covering preps at a small paper.

And Mark, I agree with you that a paper full of gamers won't lure in readers who don't have kids in school. However, I think sometimes we make a bit too much of that. In a sports section that primarily covers preps, your readers are people interested in preps. I don't dispute the logic in trying to capture more readers than that -- it's good in theory, but I consider it a lost cause. There are three different high schools I can drive to from my house in 5 minutes or less -- I don't give a rat's ass what goes on there. They weren't in the coverage area of the paper I used to work for, and I don't have kids in school, so even though I edited prep sports for a living, those schools were dead to me.

So my basic message here is that when you're a local paper that covers three high schools like the one Welch works for, you make your living by playing to your base. Your base wants game coverage. It wants to see the ups and downs of the season (mostly the ups!) documented in the pages of the local paper. Force-feeding them features that are contrived simply for the sake of not running gamers is only going to alienate that base. Do features, but make sure they're good ones.

 

All great feedback. Our enterprise pieces generally come in the form of Monday centerpieces due to limited space. Most of our centerpieces come from gamers. With typically 2 1/2 pages to work with, and three high schools to cover, gamers take up most of our room. We've gotten positive responses in our writing styles and covering games with unique outlooks for those who weren't actually there.

Love the discussion.

 

All great points, and all valid discussion, and I'm not in the small daily sports section world anymore, so I can certainly be way, way off.

But in an industry that continues to crumble, continuing to try to do the exact same thing season-in-and season-out seems as though it may be part of the problem. Maybe it's not so much having the "gamer," but how a "gamer" is defined and presented.

 

This is exactly how we're approaching it. If the gamer is written engagingly, it's sort of an enterprise-gamer hybrid. Works great with wrestling/swimming/track type of stuff and for games where one individual stands out over the crowd.

Putting people's senses and emotions to the test, as you would do in a feature-type story, is what I aim for.

 

I agree to a point. But your base can be whatever you want it to be, which is sort of the premise of the original question. If you go heavy on the high schools, your base will likely be the high school fans. If you go a different route, maybe your base will be something different. Better or worse? Hard to say. But if you're talking about revamping a section, that's one possibility.