What's your Olympic coverage plan?

Gee, Mr. Tolerance, did you notice the example you cited. Monosyllabic tailbacks. Want to venture a guess as to what race produces the large majority of running backs at the pro, college and high school (outside heavily-white states) level?

Get the plank out of your own eye before you start bugging about the splinter in someone else's.

 

Are you a sports editor or ASE?

I ask because I had almost the exact same opinion when I wasn't one. I'd roll my eyes when the boss would slap another State U practice story or high school feature on the front when I thought there were more compelling national stories.

Then I moved into this chair. Reader feedback quickly changed my mind.

 

We're a 20K daily in the Deep South with a D-1 program in town and a pro team in training camp just up the road. I can tell you flat-out, the Olympics will take a definite back seat to football – high school, college and pro – at our paper.

We'll have a daily roundup and run selected agate on the Olympics. The sports that people here have some interest in: track, basketball, swimming and gymnastics, we'll give some extra play to. We'll probably run an occasional column (if space permits), and perhaps a truly compelling feature (again, if space permits).

But we just don't have the newshole on a consistent basis or the reader interest to go hog-wild over the Olympics at the expense of the preseason football coverage our readers demand. And no amount of lecturing about what we "should be" giving our readers is going to change that.

 

We're chain of weeklies. We have a local swimming two events. My paper doesn't have AP, so we only have file are our former photog took, and it is terrible.
So we're pretty screwed - but I will, for the life of me, find a way to get at least two stories out of it and it will run huge.
That said, anyone in Beijing covering swim wants to make some cash, please PM me. Be forewarned - we're cheap.

 

I'm pretty sure this is what everyone on this thread is suggesting also. Cover football, present those "great" Olympics stories as warranted. Football, more often than not for a lot of papers, will just take precedence in terms of presentation.

It sounds like we all agree. So I'm not sure what all the commotion is about.

 

Tone, sparrow. The commotion is about tone.

 

I know that. I'm just not sure why the dude's getting his panties in a wad when we're all basically saying the same thing, apparently.