Is recruiting coverage the answer?

[Shifty Squid]

I've been told that a major metro paper is in the process of making recruiting news the No. 1 priority for its preps operation. Basically, they're looking to do what Scout and Rivals do, but use their resources to do it bigger and better for the people/players in their area. This will be largely online only.

What I'm wondering is, what do you guys think about this? There is clearly a group of readers who want this information and have been willing to pay Scout and Rivals for it. Could this be an answer to how to draw people into your Web site, if you have the resources to do it? Or do you think it's a bad idea?

I tend to think that recruiting coverage is a little salacious by nature, and I think newspapers are going to have to get into the muck, so to speak, if they plan to legitimately compete with the recruiting services. And I wonder if the newspaper might be better-served to give people what they really can't get elsewhere: Great game coverage/features/enterprise stories about area high school sports.

Any thoughts? If you could do it, would you ramp up your paper's recruiting coverage?

 

[Satchel Pooch]

Yes, six or seven years ago. Too little too late.

 

[spnited]

So some major metro (better be in a major college area) is going to cover the recruitment of maybe a couple dozen top prospects in their area, ignore the thousands of other high school athletes and call it their prep coverage?

Yeah, that's ****ing brilliant.

 

[Shifty Squid]

So some major metro (better be in a major college area) is going to cover the recruitment of maybe a couple dozen top prospects in their area, ignore the thousands of other high school athletes and call it their prep coverage?

Yeah, that's ****ing brilliant.

It is an area that's pretty teeming with talent, so it might be more than a couple of dozen. But yeah, you're not that far off. They are going to cover sports as they always have, but recruiting coverage is basically going from a small operation to their No. 1 priority on the preps beat. So traditional sports coverage is bound to suffer some, if from having fewer resources devoted to it if nothing else.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

That's a bad, bad, bad idea. God help the poor bastards answering the phones when the parents of 99.9 percent of the circulation area's high school athletes figure out why Johnny and Susie aren't getting their names in the paper.

 

[spnited]

Just what I was getting at, Gee

 

[zebracoy]

This doesn't make any sense. The kids who are worth their salt get their names in the paper on their appropriate days. If they're going to play Division I football at USC, they'll have plenty of chances. If they're going to play Division III curling at Western State, they will take their sentence and like it.

 

[tapintoamerica]

Bad idea for so many reasons:
1) People are interested in recruiting from the collegiate side, not the high school side. Therefore, the only prospects who will generate interest in this instance are those who are considering local colleges. Are there enough of them to warrant the shift in priorities? Unlikely.
2) If you're going to do recruiting as described in this example, you'll have to devote more than one person to it And how long before you burn people out?
3) The outlets that succeed in recruiting coverage are those that are willing to check their journalistic integrity at the door and become de facto recruiters for the colleges they allegedly cover. I hope we're not about to sink to that level in print.

 

[SixToe]

What a stupid idea.

 

[fossywriter8]

Of course the papers that do this won't hire more staff, but rely on who they already have "to do a little more with a little less." Meanwhile the actual news and game stories will suffer.

 

[Norman Stansfield]

I've come to the conclusion that fans who are obsessed with recruiting are akin to pedophiles.

It's just creepy to have 40- and 50-year old guys hanging on every word of a 16-year-old kid, many of whom have no clue what they're going to do tomorrow, let alone a year from now when they can sign a letter.

I know readers eat it up, but it's just really kind of sickening to me. And that comes from a guy who's covered a high-major hoops team for years.

 

[SixToe]

Buncha creepy jock-sniffers.

If you cover or have to be around the ****, you know grown men who read everything about these kids, know their backgrounds, their statistics, where they visit, the whole works. It's sad and disgusting.

 

[VJ]

I do find it ironic to crap on recruiting coverage and those that are interested in high school sports then take a paycheck covering the games. Of course there's a difference between a healthy interest in how your school/team does and obsessive stalking of these kids, but when newspaper are dying a slow and painful death, it would seem like anything that drives readers to your product would be seen as a positive.

 

[tapintoamerica]

Uh, no.

 

[Tom Petty]

So some major metro (better be in a major college area) is going to cover the recruitment of maybe a couple dozen top prospects in their area, ignore the thousands of other high school athletes and call it their prep coverage?

Yeah, that's ****ing brilliant.

damn solid.

 

[HejiraHenry]

A lot of metro daily prep coverage sucks anyway.

I'm not prepared to toss the idea overboard without knowing more about it, though. That would never, ever work in a market like ours ... but again, if their prep coverage sucks and they're looking for an organizing principle, well maybe that's a starting place.

 

[JBHawkEye]

I've come to the conclusion that fans who are obsessed with recruiting are akin to pedophiles.

It's just creepy to have 40- and 50-year old guys hanging on every word of a 16-year-old kid, many of whom have no clue what they're going to do tomorrow, let alone a year from now when they can sign a letter.

I know readers eat it up, but it's just really kind of sickening to me. And that comes from a guy who's covered a high-major hoops team for years.

A friend of mine once said of these people who intensely following recruiting, "Basically they want to know who they're going to hate for the next four years. They get all excited about every guy that's signed, and the minute they get on campus they rail on them for four or five years about how they haven't lived up to their hype."

 

[Shifty Squid]

A lot of metro daily prep coverage sucks anyway.

I'm not prepared to toss the idea overboard without knowing more about it, though. That would never, ever work in a market like ours ... but again, if their prep coverage sucks and they're looking for an organizing principle, well maybe that's a starting place.

My impression from the outside is that their preps operation is actually pretty big and pretty good. They've got a whole slew of part-timers they rely pretty heavily on, so it gives them a large staff to work with. They're slotting 4 or 5 of them to focus almost solely (but not 100%) on recruiting, while their "temporary" part-timers chip in by making some calls one or two nights a week.

The rest of their preps staff (I don't know ... something like 10 guys) will continue to work mainly on more traditional preps coverage: gamers, features, previews, etc.

I'm not certain of all the details, but this was how I understood it.

Obviously, a small paper couldn't devote these sorts of resources to this, so maybe this is something only a major metro with a large staff could pull off. The answers so far have been interesting, and I'm not sure if this information changes any thoughts on it. It just struck me as something I didn't think a newspaper had really tackled before, and I wonder if it could be successful.

 

[shotglass]

Middle-class America weighs in on this idea.

 

[Stone Cane]

I've come to the conclusion that fans who are obsessed with recruiting are akin to pedophiles.

i'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but there's definitely a measure of exploitation of these kids at work here.

i'm baffled by the popularity of "recruiting," which seems to be a regional thing, because at the northeast and midwest dailies i've worked at, it's an afterthought, there's little or no demand for coverage of it, and it's not something we would even talk about.

let's face it -- what percent of the kids who commit to D-1 schools actually end up even playing there? and what percent of the ones who do actually end up having an impact? and what percent of them stay there and graduate (or go to the NBA)?

the notion that regular updates of what some teenage kid is thinking, where he's visiting, what schools are "involved," etc., are worth putting in the paper is foreign to me and other papers in our area

we just do'nt do it