Washington Times sports

You are correct in saying there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, in the context of this thread, we are talking specifically about a market in which readers have a choice of locally produced sports sections.

It should go without saying that I wish the people there the best and respect that Mike had to make decisions based on the budget. However, readers also will make decisions based on their budgets -- they most likely will make one buy and it will not be the Times. In reinstating the killed sections, the Times is acknowledging that people will not buy an incomplete newspaper even in a news-addicted city like Washington. They need to go all the way on this or they are simply flushing money down the drain with no hope for a significant return on that investment.

 

I like running boxes but have been hacking the hell out of roundups of late, not only for space purposes, but because in most games it duplicates what already in the box. Last year we went from full wire to limited right at the start of baseball season, so ran only boxes on the state circuit. Didn't get any complaints (except from the occasional NASCAR fan) until the fall ... football fans. By that time, we were switching back to full wire.

 

Moddy, good luck with the new venture. I'll be in Washington for a few days on my spring trip so I look forward to checking out the product.

 

I'm still a fan of giving the reader the boxscores and other pertinent agate. Every day. Ahead of your odd feature story. Get the news in the paper. If that's too old-school, I'm willing to go down with the ship. Our agate section is 3-3.5 pages in a daily 16-page tabloid section. Wouldn't have it any other way.

There is one thing YGBFKM said, though, that I'm totally down with.

That is why you don't make decisions based on sitting by the telephone and waiting to hear from people. The people who are calling are not representative of your readership. They are the people who are so interested in niche coverage that they would make the phone call. That is not your majority.

Do you even know that the people calling or writing are regular readers/subscribers, or might they just be hit-and-run types who take one look at a newspaper, make judgment and decide to let you know about how they feel?

Looking forward to seeing the new Times, as only Moddy can do it.

 

That's great that you have 16 pages to work with.

But your philosophy doesn't work very well for the 30,000 circulation daily that has 4-6 pages to work with instead of the usual 8-10 that they had several years ago. Something has to go, and if it's me - someone who grew up reading newspaper agate - it's the agate. I can get it elsewhere. I want quality local stories that I can't get elsewhere.

 

And that's one of the myriad ways we lose readers these days -- by letting them go elsewhere for what they might want. Although I do fully empathize with space concerns; really I do. Our news hole has been cut 20% this calendar year.

 

That is why you don't make decisions based on sitting by the telephone and waiting to hear from people. The people who are calling are not representative of your readership. They are the people who are so interested in niche coverage that they would make the phone call. That is not your majority.

Do you even know that the people calling or writing are regular readers/subscribers, or might they just be hit-and-run types who take one look at a newspaper, make judgment and decide to let you know about how they feel?

Looking forward to seeing the new Times, as only Moddy can do it.
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Really? You should simply ignore customers who take the time to call you? Write them all off as fruitcakes? Really.

 

I'm making a habit of not repeating my points. You heard them.

 

Just wondering if anyone (in the area) has taken the time to read what the coverage is like. So far the debate is about the missing agate and the appearance of the paper.

 

I'm in the tweener age for the whole agate debate -- 40 years old, from the last class (or close to it) to graduate college without needing a laptop and Internet connection, and therefore predisposed to getting my agate with the rest of the news. I was a holdout for a long time on this one, believing that box scores and baseball leaders -- unlike stock listings, for example -- served a market that wasn't logging on. But these days I really don't know if there is a market of newspaper readers that isn't already on the Internet.

I don't know how much sports will drive circulation at the Times, my guess is it will be a nice add-on but not the singular reason for subscribing. In that light I don't think it needs to be "the record."

 

What I hate is extrapolating one point I made (readers calling about agate) and presuming that it drives our agate policy.

It doesn't. If someone calls me about lack of NHL agate (in a decidedly non-NHL market), I don't revamp everything we do to accomodate that one person. Not sure why that idea was read into my original comment.

However, there is interest in that page, and when you take the body of complaints over the singular ones, you can form a pattern that does define your news judgement.

It certainly is a vocal minority that complains about anything. And there are those -- once-in-a-while -- who have a vested interest when they complain, though I feel that brand of complainer is definitely more in the vain of the prep complainers (who have kids who try just as hard!) than anyone who takes the time to complain about lack of NHL or golf agate.

Complaints can be taken two ways -- as isolated instances, or, as a sign that there are others out there who will never bother to complain, but might sympathize with the one person who decides to complain.

Over the years, I've had complaint calls about just about every single piece of agate we've run. What that tells me is that there's general interest in that page, and like many other things in the newspaper, one part of it may appeal to some, but other parts of it don't.

The point is that you try your best to provide to all, not throw up your hands, give up, and provide a story that might appeal to an even lower percentage of the audience than the agate does out of some sense of freshening things up for the sake of freshening things up.

Trying to be all things to all people is most the biggest advantage and curse newspapers have, but my feeling is that when newspapers deviate from trying to achieve that near-impossible goal, they turn more people off than they're attempting to turn on.