You and the Olympics

On one hand, I like reading about the best stories from the best writers. For instance, JoePoz's blog account of discovering and writing the Rulon Gardner story was excellent. I would want him or SL Price or someone like that relating those stories to me. Now, you don't need a flotilla of columnists and newspaper reporters from around the country to accomplish that, so it makes little sense if you're a newspaper to spend a whole bunch of money to send one or a couple people to do basically the same work the AP or another service can do. But I do still think there are stories worth telling from events like that, beyond the standard features you're bound to see written in a standard way.

 

Chad Hedrick

 

Neither Atlanta nor Dallas qualifies as a "big" paper, unless you've got a tiny birdcage.
And as the Olympics exist for and are governed by TV, having print people show up constitutes a gargantuan waste of money.
People who like the winter sports are out on snowboards on actual hills in February, not waiting for the carrier to hurl the latest drivel about how the VCOG or VOOC volunteers are wearing merry smiles and helping with bus stop directions, or whatever every columnist (except the ones who will google the rest of 'em from the apres ski lodge and write the same drivel a day late) offers in a self-congratulatory tone that disgusts and alarms.

 

The Winter Olympics are a little different here in Boston, as a significant number of athletes on the team are from our circulation area. If a big city daily can't/won't cover locals in the Olympics, its reason for existing seems kind of tenuous to me.
It's bad enough newspapers keeping looking for ways to say "we're not a big league operation." But there seems to be a lot of Stockholm Syndrome on this board among newspaper employees. Who needs the World Series? Who needs the Olympics? It all depends on paper size, I know, but I'm a city boy, so my frame of reference is big papers. And when big papers cut back on big events, they look small. And city readers don't like small.

 

"People only give a shit about that sport every four years so it doesn't matter"

"No one cares about the Olympics any more"

"NBC and its sappy features suck and ruin everything"

"It's not like it used to be!!!"

Rinse and repeat and you have a perfect SJ topic every two years.

 

But how many locals do you need at the event to justify the expense?

Dallas, as AQB pointed out, had a skeleton driver (rider? racer? skeletoneer?) and a few NHLers playing hockey. Is that enough to justify it? What if it's only one athlete connected to your metro? Do you still send five or six people out there for that?

 

This argument can be made for any sporting event.

 

Not me. CBC all the way. NBC is verboten when it comes to winter sports.

 

I'm surprised only because it's an easy location to get to. When I covered the SLC Olympics we had more staffers there than any previous winter Olympics because it was in the US.

I'm stunned the Washington Post is only sending three.

That said, I don't care about the Winter Olympics and won't watch any of it other than the hockey.

 

Why the hell would we want to do that? ;D