Youth sports (again)

The firing is actually an interesting story. It was a very small paper, owned by one guy who was the publisher, ad guy and editor. There was one reporter for news and I was there on a part-time basis and needed the two or three other gigs I had going on at the time to pay the bills. He knew that. He knew what he was getting when he hired me.
For the first year and a half, I couldn't do anything wrong. He was very pleased with my work. The last three months, I couldn't do anything right. Seeing as how I didn't start doing all my work in fingerpaint, I didn't understand what the problem was. He wanted me to do a better job pursuading the local youth leagues to send results. The only problem was there was no fax machine and this was the pre-internet era so no e-mail. He wanted people to call and leave scores and details on our answering machine. A few people did, but we never really got the response he was hoping to get. He also wanted me to take photos, despite the fact that I had no camera, no photo experience (he knew this when he hired me) and the one camera he had always seemed to be unavailable whenever I may have needed it to shoot a game. He also wanted me to lay out pages, which at the time I had no training for and he nobody ever seemed to have the time to train me. Again, he knew this when he hired me.
Eventually, he just said he couldn't have what I was doing and he let me go. Then there was no sports editor and no sports coverage for several months. He cut off his nose to spite his face.
Turns out the guy was just batshit crazy. He was a former sportswriter at a daily who was legendary for going on the ice after a college hockey game and arguing with officials. At his paper he wrote some editorials that were out there, including one where he threatened to kick the editor of the high school newspaper's ass.
The guy died in his sleep when he was 39. A heart attack. The paper died with him.

 

That's insane, SP.

 

Yeah, it is. I felt bad about being fired for a while, but eventually I realized it was for the best.

 

Ok,
This week I have a full slate of high school stuff, a full slate of youth basketball and one page. I asked for three.
What to do, what to do...

 

not your problem ... don't make it yours

 

I would love to organize a swap of some kind between all of our papers that do have a section or weekly page(s) for youth sports. Sort of like the trade off made with the fall sports tabs and special sections.

Would anyone else be interested in such a trade off? We could get a total of how many papers or people who run the youth sections want to be included and then each send that many copies of your section, page(s) to me and then I would ship one of each out to everyone included in the swap.

What do you think?

Personally I think we'd be able to get some insight on how others are doing things and how we could possibly streamline what it is we are currently doing.

 

Me or KySportsWriter can send a PDF of one of our youth/rec/outdoors page to anyone who wants it.

Not spectacularly designed by any means, but gets the names in.

 

Shoot me a PM or e-mail on Facebook, RSC.

 

You have one page? That's it?

 

Yep, one page. It was a 16-page paper.
All youth sports went online. High school only this week.

 

Taters, I come from an area that thrives (cringe) on youth sports. Simply put, if you want to sell papers you have to run this bullshit.

That doesn't mean you can't make rules for the leagues to follow. Send out a game form that the leagues copy for each game. Score, top two scorers for each team and a defensive stat.

However, if you make a mistake you have to correct it. If you left something out last week just tack it on to this week's roundup with the team. The world isn't going to end if you add .02 inches of copy.

 

Farmer, I don't see how not publishing something because I don't have room for it (not because I underestimated the volume of copy, but because for reasons beyond my control the paper is smaller than expected) is a mistake.
It's not like paying bills, where if you don't have the money to pay a bill one month, you damned well better have enough to pay two months' worth of bills the next.
The readers may see it that way, but that's not the way it works.