What are you, as journalists, looking for from a sports info department

I don't know that I agree with this. It is the sports information departments job to give you the information. It is not their job to write the lede for you. Yes, that would be a slanted intro, but I would expect it to be, as the writer works for the school. You wan't to focus on the fact that player X shit the bed and had an ERA of 72, that's fine. The info is there.

 

He says it's a small school. Many papers would be using the information to put in a roundup or something.

You don't want to wade through 16 grafs of flowery highlights about how hard some team tried in a 12-0 loss. It's like playing seek and find, takes longer and is likely to lead to errors.

Better to play it straight. If you have a highlight, put it up high.

Some of these whitewashes are dreadful.

 

The freaking stat book ASAP after the game and don't blame the coaches if they don't show up to their own damn press conferences.

 

There go your hopes of ever working for mlb.com.

 

After compiling our weekly college notebook last night, I not-so-humbly request hometowns to be included in whatever goes up on your website. Be particularly careful with kids from private schools, because the town in which their schools are located are frequently not their hometown.

 

Either hometowns or high schools are good. I hate having to go search to see if kids are local.

My special pet peeve, though, are school websites that list just the club team for volleyball.

 

I could go on and on, and I probably will later when I have more time, but I will say this: If you're a tiny school that's located 300 miles (or more) from Player X's hometown, and Player X's hometown paper doesn't cover your school, and Player X has one assist in a 9-0 soccer game and you don't make that clear anywhere except in the last paragraph, leaving us wondering why we've received the e-mail ... it's best you just don't send it. It just makes me bitter.

 

The school I cover now sends us the full releases that go up on the website. They work for the university, not for you. The media relations department has been renamed athletics communication, and they honestly see the newspaper as competition for website eyes. They're not going out of their way to send stuff out. The model was out there 10 years ago no longer exists. Universities don't need us at all. They'll send stuff out as a courtesy, but they're not bending over to help us any more.

 

I'd like a volleyball box score with last names at the very least, and possibly first names spelled correctly. Helps if the stats were legible as well.

 

As a former TV sports guy, get us all your scores/stats by 5:30 pm and 9:30 pm (if possible - for the 6pm and 10pm newscasts).

Each week, let us know the practice times/locations for all of your teams.

Hate to say it, but the local college that "made it easy" got more coverage. We even had one high school that sent us a fax each week with the stories about their top performers and when the teams were practicing for the week. They got more airtime than the others.

 

This. Putting "News Release" in the subject matter usually means a trip to seeyalaterland.

How about a quick study of the rosters before setting the mailing lists. I really don't care about your tennis or soccer team, which seems to get most of its players from out of the country, but I do care about your volleyball and baseball teams, which does have players from our area. So why flood me with tennis?

 

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