Greeley (Co.) Tribune lays off sports department

The University of Northern Colorado probably generates less reader interest than many D-1 programs due to the proximity of the campus to Denver and the fact that the Broncos own the state. But the school has an enrollment of 12,000 students, 1,600 staff and numerous alumni.

I am only guessing that in a smaller town an FCS program generates more page views week in and week out than virtually any other beat. What beats would generate more views? I would guess the police beat and perhaps city hall but I am only guessing. I would be curious what beats generate the most page views in a smaller paper.

 

From my limited experience having access to reader numbers at Patch, for two small communities (15k and 30k): cops and courts as well as the weekly or monthly feature on someone everybody likes / feels sad for, big gap, football and town council, big gap, random sport the school was successful at, big gap, meat and potatoes sports and news coverage.

 

I think a lot of papers are sending their beat writer to home events but not on the road. At one of my previous stops we were one of the few to travel with our FCS program, but I believe they have done away with that since I left.

 

Looking at the larger picture, in Greeley's case, you have 4 professional franchises and CU that one could argue would generate more interest than a program that draws in the bottom third of FCS.

Again, in no way am I defending this publisher's decision, but in my experience the trend is to pull back on coverage that would have been unthinkable 10, 15 years ago.

 

In our experience, with degrees in Journalism and having worked on several newspapers, the way to go in and start or restart a newspaper in a community without one, is to focus heavily on local sports, town council meetings, school board meetings, school news and features, business news and features, and features about local individuals with interesting hobbies, careers or achievements. Those local sports stories, ranging from high school teams to Little League to dirt track racing to fishing and outdoor activities, are often among our most read (we have software which tracks readership on our websites). On a daily newspaper, there are many readers who turn to the paper every Saturday morning to check out the high school football stories, and during the Winter every Wednesday and Saturday morning to check out high school basketball stories. We have stats to prove this. A significant number of males subscribe to their local paper mainly for sports. In Colorado, for instance, they can get better regional, national and world news from the Denver Post, but only the local paper will give them in depth coverage of the local teams. For this publisher to be oblivious to this suggests (l) he doesn't know what he is doing and (2) he's going to find out the hard way in a steep circulation drop. Furthermore, there are issues in sports beyond scores and stats. Only experienced reporters uncover those issues.

 

Okay.

 

The thing is they know (even if they're pretending otherwise) that their sports coverage will be shit. They think it won't matter, much, at least.

They want scores and a couple of features per week. They probably don't realize how much the quality of those features will dry up as the institutional knowledge and benefit of decades of coverage dissipates, but they, as many have pointed out, have a D1 university and more than a dozen high schools to feed on, so even if you miss all the "good" human interest stories and just use MaxPreps to find stories (i.e., write about the leading scorers) and rely on the few tips you'll still get, they'll probably have enough to get over that very low bar.

I don't know how much it'll hurt traffic or readership, but they seem to think their numbers say "not a lot." The last 15 years have been about seeing how much you can cut out of a newspaper before people stop reading. I'm not sure why this will be the last straw for readers. At some point papers will be so devoid of anything worthwhile, the only people who will subscribe will be those who can't figure out how to cancel and there will be so little new online that the traffic will die, too. But, really, it doesn't even seem to be about the straw that breaks the camels back. The camel is dead and rotted. Will cutting all meaningful sports coverage end the Greeley Tribune? I'd love to say yes, but I'm not sure that's what'll do it any more than any of the other 1,000 little cuts they've made for the last decade.

The sad thing for us is seeing someone place utterly no value on our profession. I hope they're wrong but I think they're too dead for us to really be able to tell.

 

I see where you are coming from and I am not trying to go Fredrick on you.

But the Greeley Tribune website is offering subscriptions to the electronic edition and four print issues a week for $14 a month. The Denver Post is offering a subscription to the electronic edition for $12 a month.

Since the Post has actual sportswriters, a state house bureau (I once read the Tribune does not have a state house reporter) I wonder why the publishers of the Greeley paper would subscribe to it. What does Greeley offer?

As an aside, the Post is offer a subscription to the Wednesday-Sunday editions four dollars a week and a seven day edition for seven dollars a week. The website for subscriptions describes the four day a week edition as the most popular. I think this is an ominous sign for the Post publishing seven days a week.

 

I clearly don't understand the newspaper business. I always thought the intent was to provide news of interest to the readers at an affordable price. So what has the industry done? Get rid of "content producers," raise subscription rates exponentially and can't get the print version delivered, then wonder why subscribers are leaving in droves.

 

The point, though, is to make money, isn’t it? At very least since the coming on of the mega chains. Greeley isn’t owned by one of them. It’s owned by a fairly local chain of mountain and resort town papers that’s actually pretty ok in the grand scheme of things. (Greeley is the only meaningful one to go this route so far, though the others are all one-person sports desks, I think.)

Their math right now says it makes sense financially to cut sports.

“Cutting sports will cost us 500 subscribers but save us $90,000. We come out ahead by $75,000” or whatever.

But eventually cutting something won’t cost $15,000 of whatever the expected loss in subscribers and traffic will be. Eventually it’ll be like Jenga. You’ve already hallowed out the tower, but you still have a tower. Eventually you’ll think you can pull one more block out and boom, the whole thing comes down. Maybe sports is the thing.

 

At my last paper, covering an FCS (now FBS) program with a decent basketball program, we went to every football game and picked and chose our spots with hoops, going to roadies that were down and backs but skipping anything that required a hotel stay until the conference tournament. I really couldn't argue with the logic. It was a one-bid league and quite honestly, the only thing that matters--interest wise, outside of the diehards--in those leagues is those three or four days in March. You pick your battles, and covering road hoops was one I was fine with not fighting.

 

That's a perfect analogy