Youth sports and a shrinking sports section

I'm at a weekly. One page usually does the trick. This time it did not and all I had was two pages.

 

we try and get in all of the stuff folks turn in to us, unless it reaches "War and Peace" proportions. sometimes it can get out of bounds if some of our youth leagues get slow in reporting and it backs up, but normally we run it. i see it as being more readable for local subscribers as some wire story...again, it's names, names, names....that is what sells the youth sports sections, notebooks, etc.

 

Is putting it on the Web site really a poor substitute for putting it in the paper?

 

Depends on how you present it. If it's a shitty Web site -- and, no offense, most small papers' sites are -- then it will never suffice, even if your audience has adapted to the technology.

 

If all you had was two pages, then your readers will just have to understand the fact that space was tight.

 

Why not this -- go to your ad staff and tell them you get tons of youth basketball/sports copy and want to run it but don't have room; see if they can sell-specific for this stuff, to increase the size of your section ... obviously there is an audience for it. Give them the list of coaches/parent contact names and see if they recognize any names of local business people who may have ties to the teams. Maybe they can be approached about sponsoring youth rec sports pages, etc.

We've had better luck selling "niche" ads for specific things like youth sports, high school state champions, etc. as opposed to just soliciting ads for the sports section in general... anyways, my .02 cents

 

Good luck with that, Futura. I used to provide our ad staff with youth sports, with outdoors and with prep football contacts for possible advertisements in the past. Never got a sniff -- although it's hard to get a sniff when you don't ever call. :

 

we work with our ad department on alerting them to youth groups, etc. and how they might can get extra advertisers. it's all about helping each other out.

 

I hear you ... We used to have ad folks who knew sports very well and thus we had some nice tabs and special ad pages around our sports teams ... now we have pretty much no one other than me who really cares about sports -- thus our 16-page basketball tab went to zero this year ... next step, go to the publisher ... after that, punt...

 

we run a summer tab just of youth team baseball and softball photos. talk about selling. imagine the grandparents and parents who swarm to the office to buy extra copies. complete with names, of course.
and just the other day we ran a photo of a youth team that had won a fall soccer title.
yep, very popular.
when i do one of those "dots and dashes" columns, i sometimes work in even local yokels' names if they have done something significant or whatever..just enough to whet the appetite and keep some of the younger athletes' names out there.

 

Our youth sports results got out of hand a few years ago, so now we just insert game wraps into a capsule form. Score, records, leaders..etc. Just the basics. Put it in agate and the parents are thrilled.

 

i can't remember where i heard or read about this -- maybe it was at a seminar -- but there was a paper who would have a full page of stories devoted to one high school in their coverage area and "wrap" it separate from the paper...one week it might be John Doe High, the next Martha Stewart High until they covered everybody. it would include a column, game results, big feature, big photos, etc...sure it was a headache for pressmen or inserters, circulation folks, etc..but it was very popular.