Four Kentucky papers (run by Boone) cut sports sections on same day

Appears to be Kentucky only.

Haven't seen anything yet to prove otherwise, but I might have missed it.

 

If they're doing it in Kentucky, you can be damn sure its being considered for the rest of the papers as well ...

 

Why would page views not indicate interest in a particular piece? The interests of digital subscribers and dead tree subscribers cannot be that great.
If hedge funds are the only entities buying newspapers, why is that? If there were a better economic use of the newspaper, why aren't investors buying them, investing in them, and making them the local resource that people want?

 

It's an easy stance to ridicule, but I think back to my days as a preps writer, and probably 75 percent of my job was doing stuff that doesn't need to be done now that there are smart phones and social media. Shit, at least 20 percent of the work week was chasing down scores and stats on Friday night, in person or via phone. If you're interested in a specific HS game these days, you can get way more information and context via social media in real time than you would have gotten in a 500-word game story on Saturday morning back in the day. I'm not saying that writing about HS sports is worthless...covering the beat the way it used to be covered definitely is.

 

Sure hope not. I have friends at Boone papers. And I hate the idea of anyone losing their job.

 

There's a Boone publication not far from my corner of the world. And I wouldn't put it above them to dump the position ... granted between the pay scale - an insult to journalists, even factoring in what publishers and other newspaper executives are getting away with - and what the top editor thinks coverage is, the spot is already in serious trouble.

 

I remember a discussion on some thread on how many page views high school sports received. The consensus was that they receive a fair amount of hits.

Readers were quite interested in the high school close to their house. So if a paper was in a one or two high school town and covered the high schools as beats then page views were pretty good. But there was little interest in high school sports in general. So when Hometown High loses in the state quarterfinals that story will drive a lot of interest. But a story on the state semifinals would receive very few views.

 

We have software that tracks readership on our online edition. Our readership consistently ranks as follows : l. Stories on City Council. 2. Stories on the local school board and stories about the local schools. 3. Stories about the high school football or basketball team (baseball and other sports rank much lower). 4. Stories about the local dirt track (what used to be called "stock car racing" but now consists of high tech $100,000 cars just one notch below NASCAR). Everything Else ranks lower, including crime, fires, features, obits, weddings, political campaigns, environmental issues and other sports.

Since we spend every day out in the community, we hear a lot of feedback, both good and bad. We consistently hear that l. Fans who go to the games enjoy reading the articles the next day to place everything in a narrative context, give them insight they didn't pick up on during the game, give them the statistics, and let them read the comments by the two coaches and players from both teams; 2. Players enjoy reading the articles and seeing the photos; 3. Fans, players and parents cut out or print out those articles and photos for scrapbooks which will sit on the coffee table for the next 50 years; 4. Fans who can't make it to the game really appreciate the chance to keep up with the team by reading the articles and seeing the photos.

Our small town newspaper cannot compete with the big metro papers for national and world news. Everyone we know subscribes to two papers : ours and one major metro paper. They use ours for what we might call Hyper Local News, that is, news the big metro papers never touch. Sports is a major component of that Hyper Local News. If you start deleting your Hyper Local News, what reason remains for a reader to subscribe to your paper? They can just subscribe to the metro paper.

When we plan to move into a new circulation area (usually because their own local paper has folded), here's how we strategize: l. Cover their local sports, their town councils, and their school board and school news. 2. Start selling subscriptions. 3. Start selling ads in that area.

This Boone management team is not practicing Journalism; They're just squeezing every dollar out of the business while strangling it. They already know the end result is the closing of the paper.

 

Dan O., we have similar software at our shop. Unfortunately, obits and crime stories blow away everything else we post online in terms of clicks.

High school sports does well when we have a good features story or coverage of a key game for local teams (conference championship, rivalry games, state tournaments).

"Government" stories about city council, county board and schools do the worst of all, unfortunately ... because those are things newspapers need to cover. But you can't make people eat their vegetables.