Weeklies and sports

A twice-weekly is like the aforementioned 3x, and you said it yourself, JD ... many readers expect it to act like a daily. Jump on the live events if they're next-day. Gamers. Are. Not. Dead.

Mix live with set features, such as player of the week, a notebook on that D-III college, a notebook on high school sports.

 

Sounds like McMinnville, OR...did I guess right?

And yes, 2x and 3x weeklies I say just go for a solid balance of what's ahead and what's happened. The good thing is that your readership does go to your source for gamers, etc, so you get a wide variety in your work.

I say the web is for short capsules and timely updates...if they want the whole bag of bananas make them subscribe. (Different if you must subscribe to see the site).

 

This is easier said than done. At my place, the papers are weekly, but we do daily coverage on the web and the intent is that we have a full online package. We end up cranking out a lot of game coverage that never makes it into print because it's coverage of games that don't make sense for our print deadline.

Our print deadlines are during the day, the coverage and editing for the web takes place at night. It is challenging and exhausting. We have a major metro that covers our schools, but their coverage area is so big, they only hit the cream of the crop. We're the "hometown" paper. There is no truly local daily, so our web presence fills that role. Essentially we're both a daily and a weekly, which makes it tough to be exceptional at either approach.

 

drop the web shenanigans...you're putting in all that effort for what? So people can cancel their papers and get the news they care about online?

This industry makes me scratch my head sometimes.

 

Put in the Web effort so that you develop skills on the web. Win-win-win.

 

I'd caution about trying to get a baseball in a swing photo if you have a camera that is crap and isn't fast enough to catch the baseball, thus making it a two or three inch streak. That is what looks like crap. I have equipment right now where I can get the ball in photos, but I've had other equipment where it looked like crap. Another variable is print quality. I've been at papers where the printing is decent and bad. At the bad one combined with the bad equipment, it can do a doozy on photos.

As for gamers, weekies in small rural towns usually like a lot of gamers, but you also need to present some previews, features, etc. A balance. Previews during football season are a must. For basketball, they can be more over say, let's look at the second round of league play and how it could shake out. I'd do game previews starting at the district level of the tournament.

Ultimately, you have to play it by ear. If your customer wants something, you need to deliver it. If you go to Wendy's and ask for your burger a certain way and the cook says I know this way is better and this is how you are going to get it, you aren't probably going to go back.

 

The ability to have 500-word game stories up on the web the night of the game and have a completely different story ready for print two days later depends largely on staffing. If you're trying to write four stories for print and do layout, as so many at weeklies are, then the 500-word game story isn't going to be realistic. It's nice to get the nuts and bolts down in a 200-word story after a game, but I tend to mostly agree with flexmaster; there's better ways to use your time. Maybe they don't serve the community at large quite as well, but they serve your readership better by allowing you to focus on a better print product. And, as flexmaster said, all of this changes if you're a pay site. And frankly, if you're providing very unique coverage to a small town Patch hasn't touched yet, being a pay site can be very, very beneficial.

 

I totally agree that good copy sells papers. I'm just saying that, in my area, when parents find out there is a team photo with their kid, they buy a paper. The hope, in turn, is that they enjoy said paper and see good writing, too.

 

Thanks for all this info and input, everyone. I have a meeting with the managing editor and the publisher to discuss this tomorrow.

 

Nah, parents just care about seeing their kids' name in the paper, even if it just in the agate.

 

One major thing should this happen: One of our editions - our biggest one, actually - goes to the printer Friday afternoon and hits shelves on Mondays. I can see a definite problem in football coverage. Suggestions?

 

Law school.