SID stories on the front page

My former shop ran two SID gamers from the D-II college in town on the sports front today. I never allowed that when I was SE.

Do your papers have guidelines about that?

(Also, these weren't road games. They were played in town. One writer was at State U's game just up the road. One was covering playoff basketball. The third had the day off, I guess. That meant of the five local bylines in today's paper the SID had three - one baseball, one men's basketball and one women's basketball.)

 

Did the SID get a byline?

 

Yes, "Joe Smith, Podunk U SID."

 

What a proud day for publishers.

 

Gross.

 

If you can't cover them in person (and the staff was obviously occupied elsewhere), can't hire a stringer or get a story from another paper, yet it's important enough to warrant a front page presence, what are you supposed to do? You can't be in two places at once, no matter what some management types seem to believe about the laws of physics.
This was obviously not ideal, but you get the material whatever way you can, right? If you ignore it for the sake of appearances, or pull together a lesser story just to avoid having an SID byline in the paper, who does that really serve?

 

We run SID copy on front page, but don't give a byline. We mention it came from SID at the end.

 

These are my favorite SID stories!

 

Could the third writer have taken off on a different day? And how important is the D-II program to your readers?

 

Is this something readers notice? Or is it another of those things that we agonize over but that actually doesn't make nearly as much difference as we probably want it to?

I agree that it's odd to give the SID a byline -- what ever happened to "Staff reports"? But still -- you can't cover everything, whether you have a staff of three, 30 or 300. There'll always be something that slips through. And this sort of thing becomes ever more prevalent if your publisher insists on an all-local front, or cuts your wire service.

And who knows why the third guy took off -- maybe he was sick, or getting married, or worked the past 13 days without a day off. Maybe his normal day off is Wednesday and that's even busier, so he agreed to switch.

 

Whatever happened to "staff and wire reports"

 

I'm not sure about the scheduling thing. But as far as the program, it was source of many reader complaints/questions when we didn't, say, have coverage of road games. We always staffed home games back then.