Mlive: Letting parents cost their kids scholarships

Including many who do so for a living.

 

Even when I covered preps, I questioned the value. There was no way I would not cover them, but I knew most of my readers were more interested in the Detroit Tigers than the Hometown High Tigers.

Coverage is best in local one- or two-town papers. In my regional paper, there are too many articles from schools far away from my community. I will read a feature, but never a wrestling or water polo game article from 45 mile Away High vs. 38 mile Away Prep. Heck, even for the local school that my son attends, I only read football and scan other sports to see if any kids I know are mentioned.

 

So a writer wrote that lead MC quoted? I assumed that was a community reporter (parent).

 

I really don't see how this will work. I would write up little items on my son's high school wrestling team for the weekly PTA newsletter. I would keep it short and fair and include photos I took with my cell phone. Other parents complained that wrestling items had photos every week.

 

No. According to the byline, "Superfan" wrote that.

I guess they treat bylines like the backs of XFL jerseys.

 

Thanks, Dick.

 

I would say that if you give a damn enough to visit a site like this, then you give a damn enough not to turn out bad work, so don't take it personally. A lot of preps writing is terrible. A lot of sports writing is terrible, generally. A lot of my preps and sports writing was terrible. A lot of inexperienced people cover preps at local papers. That's part of it.

 

Right. That's flawed/misguided.

 

I don't mean this is a personal knock on you and your paper, but perhaps I do on Gannett: Your "realization" is pure common sense. Who's going to spend time clicking on however many different prep stories when what you want is a one-stop shop for all that stuff, right in front of you - in a paper.

And I know what Gannett and Advance say - where they stand. I don't agree with them any more than I agreed with folks back in the mid-90s who were fetching angel investments based on the number of "hits" to a Web site, as if that translated into advertising dollars.

The Web is not useful for mass quantities of small data unless that data can be arranged in a way that's visually pleasing and additionally informative. It's useful for college coverage (although newspapers unwisely let recruiting sites get far too much of the market share) and sports enterprise.

But the paper - if sold correctly (which, again, is hard to do in this age) - can gather a lot of the small data in place. You cover preps well, in other words, and do it well enough that people need that coverage and they know where it is. Gannett, in one paper, has unwisely told readers to go look at photos of a state tournament online while running a few blurbs in the paper. In the long run, that's a losing strategy. The photos online, unless there's an incredible one, won't get enough attention and clicks. And what do they - along with most online photos - mean anyway? Nothing. In a paper, if you present a full state tournament section, people, in my experience, will read it. If you can give them a narrative for why they should.

I believe in a more robust preps section with some actual talent afforded to it. There's excellent stories in preps, enterprise stuff, if you're willing to put some resources to it. And, yes, it takes more than a newbie to flesh it out. And I don't think I'm being pollyanna/head in the sand about it, either. I think journalists have long had an eye toward "prestige" more than good sense, much like businesses tend to crap on how it pays its customer service folks while it overpays its "processors" in the back. I'd put preps enterprise above a college beat - where it's all laid out for you in press conferences and teams clamp down access to coaches and players unless you want to help them recruit.

 

Oh, I certainly agree with this, Alma. To this day, that's some of the best work I've ever produced. Either that or off-beat stuff from the college beat, either on former players who I didn't have to go through official channels to access, or enterprise issues-type stories.

By all means, the preps enterprise stuff shouldn't be skimped on. But I don't think you need a lot of daily pages devoted to preps.

 

I'm in the south, Matt, and they definitely do care. I get complaints every week about games we aren't able to cover.

 

I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining. We didn't stop covering preps, we stopped covering most games outside of playoff action. Gamers in general just aren't that exciting for people in 2015. If they want to know what happened, most will check Twitter and know by the time the final score hits. Every Tuesday, we still have a dedicated preps section with a notebook, area stat leaders and at least one feature, we're just not as interested in the games. Neither are readers.

There are a lot of fantastic stories in preps and we focus our efforts telling those with features and enterprise packages that look at financials behind the sports (even did a full package on how stores were making money from settling bootleg school schwag, with none of the proceeds going back to the schools). People are interested in those. The gamers ... meh. Haven't had a single complaint about print going to roundups for games instead of being at 5 games per week.