Watching the game at the local bar with regular people stories

Yeah, try The Manhole.

 

Gee, this is as interesting a thread topic as those lame stories about what the governor/mayor of the Super Bowl states/cities are betting.

 

My shop didn't do stories, but webvideos from different bars with a national spin. We did six, I think, in all. Some were better than others, but they all worked pretty well.

 

You don't have to be a smartass if you've got nothing to add. You can simply click to another thread if you don't like this one. Some people here -- lurkers among them -- will have to addess this topic in the next week or two.

Personally, I don't like these stories. I would much rather find a connection to the game -- kid with local roots on one of the teams, someone in your coverage area who actually has tickets to the game, etc.

Or if you must go to the bars to report, make it about the business. How much more money does that bar make than on that Sunday as opposed to a typical Sunday? How dead will that make the following Sunday look on their books? Any bizarre requests made for that Sunday? Are there any Colts or Bears bars in town? How long have those fans gone to that bar to watch the games every Sunday? Stories like that.

 

joe sixpack stories suck donkey balls.

 

ME had a correspondent do a man-on-the-street story about a little league football game. So, you know, it could always be worse.

 

Or the Blue Oyster, from the Police Academy flicks.

 

Oz,
Good call on the chicken salad recipe.
Rarely does anything good come from this type of story, but there are others who don't understand the concept and purpose of gamers, notes, columns, etc. These things are about luck and skill meeting at the same place. Like walking through the door of the joint to do your story and seeing a sign over the bar that says free beer for anyone named Diego. The skill comes in showing ID to get free beer. Oh, and calling in sick to work so as to drink more.

 

or from the chocolate moose -- a real bar -- on figure skating.

 

Back when the Cowboys made their first Super Bowl under Jimmy and Jerry, the shop I was at (some 350 miles from Dallas) decided to do all these local-angle stories. My assignment was to call up as many churches as I could and do a story on how many were altering/dumping Sunday night services so the congregation could watch.

 

I actually had a writer from the NY Post approach me at the Park Avenue Country Club during a Yankees playoff game, and he wanted to ask me a few questions about the game, and the Yankees and what have you...

For the next five minutes, I proceeded to ridicule him and his paper for continually pushing these lame stories. He immediately walked out the door.

 

The biggest problem with those stories is that they usually hand them to the rookie news-siders who are stuck working weekends. That's mostly why they usually suck.