Mlive: Letting parents cost their kids scholarships

I'll stick with Illinois, because I know it well.

In a smaller market like, say, Moline or LaSalle-Peru, quite a few people still want to read about the prep games. Whether online on Friday night or in print Saturday morning. And if you're the local paper, that's what you should stress, because there's better coverage of Chicago pro teams and Big Ten sports elsewhere.

 

I'm with you 100% on the CSU approach.

I think gamers can be provocative and interesting enough to be print-worthy - close to a column without using the word "I" - but those are harder to pull off, IMO, than columns. At a 25,000 circ, you may not have that person in house if it isn't the columnist, who, after all, is writing the column.

 

Everyone keeps saying "quite a few people" still attend prep games or "a lot of people" still want to read stories about high school sports events. That's such a generic statement. How much is "quite a few people?" How much is "a lot of people?" Is it enough to defend covering high school sports as a small-to-mid-sized newspaper's No. 1 sports beat? I used to think so, but I'm not so sure anymore.

I'm at a shop that recently was bought by a new company. That new company wants sports sections to transition away from high school sports and do more community/outdoors/fringe/alternate sports stuff, and less gamer stories or bland HS sports features. Considering the newspaper (around 25K) is in Florida with nothing greater than a JUCO baseball/basketball/softball team to cover, that sounded ridiculous. "Preps is the bread and butter!" I thought. Well, I also wanted to keep my job and there is talk of trimming the three-person sports staff to two. They don't want us to eliminate prep sports but follow a less-extreme version of what MLive.com is doing (fewer regular season gamers, fewer preview stories, less forcing of "New QB Jon Doe ready to fill old QB Paul Blart Mall Cop's shoes" type features). Friday night football is still on, but winter basketball? Don't fret if it can't be done, whereas last year we covered a game or two a night and centerpieced it most of the time or ran 30-inch tennis gamers this spring (not me, I know that's incredulously long). But new company flat-out believes it doesn't generate the same interest as outdoors coverage, community sports features, focusing on those fringe sports that often slides through the cracks at papers focusing heavily on preps.

So I did a test, and maybe it's off the mark and the articles aren't comparable but whatever. I examined the "Facebook reach" and "interactions" of two stories posted on the same day. One was a high school football feature our paper is doing in a series for spring football. It was a fairly interesting feature about two QBs in a competition to be the starter of a large school with a good-sized following (compared to the others we cover).

The other was a feature on a local female pool player who won a $10,000 tournament in Las Vegas. I felt the quality of the articles were around the same. The HS football one achieved Facebook stats of around 8,000 reach and 30 likes, at most 10 shares. The pool player? 15,000 reach with 196 likes. It just hits a wider audience.

Sure, it all depends on the location and readership, but I think the common ground is somewhere in the middle. There needs to be a mixture, at papers without a pro or major college program, where you give readers a variety of different topics and someone isn't staring at an all-preps front page. The readership is too niche and the size of interested parties is just too small. That might be a very obvious statement. The main point is I don't think prep sports from the fashion most small, hyperlocal newspapers go about covering them is deserving as a constant "No. 1 beat." It's too narrow.

 

My understanding - someone correct me if I'm wrong - is that MLive already has excellent beat writers covering Michigan. And given how intensely the program is covered - by Detroit's two papers, by radio, by the student daily, by a fan blog that's competitive - I think you rely on your few resources there to produce enterprise and refocus your resources where other people aren't.

It's not that I think college beats are unworthy. It's that the access is tightly controlled by the schools. In terms of players and insight, you'll get what Jim Harbaugh and his merry band gives you. I guess you can throw a ton of resources at that, but you may end up describing the color of Harbaugh's hat.

 

One huge reason that a lot of local reporters and papers cover preps so wall-to-wall is simple: It's easy. Easy to get a schedule and go to games. Easy to crank out some previews. Easy to know who is in your "coverage area." Where the schools are. Where their fields are. Easy, easy, easy.

Finding interesting community features that generate 196 Facebook likes? A lot harder.

So reporters and sections convince themselves that preps are important. Because preps are easy.

 

TGO, you're right about the Outdoors, fitness-related and extreme sports stories. They should be part of the mix, even at smaller papers.

Problem for sports is ... sometimes the news side snags them away, especially if you're in an area where hunting/fishing are a big deal. Or your paper may have a once- or twice-a-week section that covers those topics (our shop has a decent Outdoors feature section every Thursday).

I've also seen newspapers do a good job with a "Fitness" feature section. Lots of inspirational stories to centerpiece in a weekly section, and maybe there's a personal trainer, fitness or nutrition expert who can write a column.

 

Honestly, in terms of how many go to games, I would get attendance numbers from the schools. Our prep reporter just did a story about the the local school district wanting to add a new sports complex (the four public high schools in town share one stadium). He got the paid attendance numbers and it was surprising how small they were. For Friday night football games, paid attendance averaged 775; 405 for Thursday games (keep in mind this doesn't include band, teachers, students or anyone who gets in with a pass). We're talking four Class 5A high schools (largest classification in CO) and that few people pay to attend. The new stadium isn't needed for capacity, but for scheduling purposes.

Imagine the shock my coworker felt two years ago. His sons both played football at one of the local high schools. When CSU was playing at Tulsa, the two of us went out to Broken Arrow HS to watch a QB recruit who committed to CSU. I'm a Jenks boy, I've been to regular-season games with 30,000 people in the stands vs. Union, but for him, this was amazing. For a regular-season, non-rivalry game, announced attendance was 13,000. Playoff games in Colorado don't draw close to that.

It's a culture thing. I wish it wasn't. I know I've talked about focusing less on prep gamers, but I love prep sports and events. While in high school, I started a popular site for prep sports news and discussion after CoachesAid went premium. I was that annoying kid who knew anything and everything about prep athletes and coaches in Oklahoma (now I'm just that annoying kid). Had I never had a passion for preps, I probably wouldn't be in this business. I love trying to discover the stars of the future and see them break out. If I grew up in Colorado, though, I'm not sure I'd feel the same way. It's kind of sad, honestly, but that's the way it is in some places.

 

One of the biggest problems I've encountered in newsrooms over my last 30 years is that journalists often confuse "what we find interesting" with "what people find interesting." Really, the only way you can know what your community wants to read is by being out in the community, which means getting beyond walking the sidelines and talking to the same coaches over and over every day.

 

Thing is, there is no common ground. Because every audience is different.

There are places where preps don't merit any more than final scores in the tiny type. And there are places -- places Dick has never visited -- where you can't do enough with preps. Including gamers.

 

I think it's hilarious that you think this.

Six years, shottie.

Six years.

Many more if you include stringing before and after.

 

OK. I'll bow to your experience. But I still think you look at things very narrowly.

 

Well, somebody has to win $10,000 first. That story wasn't "found." It happened.

IMO, Facebook shares/likes can be useful for national platforms. For local ones, it could be the person's 178 Facebook friends, plus some readers.

It's not hard to generate likes. I could get real cynical into the ways it's not hard, but it's not hard. It's also barely journalism.

And it may or may not make someone pick up a paper.

What makes people pick up a paper, day after day after day - not just newsstand stuff - is the consistent elements they know they want to get. How'd the Amazon guy phrase it? The bundle. You have to have compelling, consistent bundle that offers something that clicking on the Web for two hours does not.