From The Washington Post: Amid layoffs and furloughs, sportswriters wonder what will be left of a st

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Irony alert.

 

If I were a sportswriter (and I thank God I gave up my dreams of being one in college) I would wonder about this.

Ninety percent of the interest in sports in this country is in the four major professional leagues which comprise 123 or so teams and in the FBS schools, of which there are about 130. If you assign two beats reporters to each of those teams you need about 1,000 sportswriters. This is basically the model of the Athletic.

But most sportswriters work on high school and small college beats. As the industry continues to cut will high school sports and small college sports stop being covered, especially as small town papers get rolled up into larger regional publishing operations. I think what just happened at the Greeley Tribune is the future. And COVID-19 will make it happen a hell of a lot faster because not all the lost advertising is coming back.

So there will only be the chosen 1,000 or so left.

 

The concern is two-pronged. On the pro/major college side, I've long expected a curtailment of access. Major colleges have been cutting access for years with little backlash - certainly not from their fans. As teams began hiring their own beat writers and developing their own in-house content 20 or so years ago, the role of an independent journalist went from "free advertising" and "conduit to the public" to "competition." Journalists and independent media outlets now compete with the teams themselves for eyeballs, for sponsor dollars, et al. They don't see us as necessary, and would rather promote their own content than anything we're doing. Now that they see a mode to restrict access - closing locker rooms, interviews via Zoom with a limited pool of pre-selected personnel - that train's leaving the station and probably never coming back.

But the one area where local papers can have an advantage over The Athletic is local coverage. Nobody is going to be able to cover local preps like the local newspaper ... but the audiences for those are very micro-local and niche. The only way to reach a wider audience is by telling good stories, but to do that, you have to have personnel and time to report and write those really good stories. They can be found, but it's very difficult. The suits don't want micro-local. They don't see value in having someone cover local sports for 500-1,000 clicks on a story, when a canned story about the local NFL team that's appearing in 10 other outlets will generate 10K clicks. It's going to lead to more local newsrooms becoming skeleton 2-3 person operations - with sports being 100% handled by stringers willing to work for $25-50 a story. The schools are, again, noticing this and beginning to produce their own content via their own websites, producing their own content. Most do a very lousy job - coaches do their own write-ups of games on the websites with varying levels of quality - but every town has a photographer willing to give photos to the athletic department for free in exchange for access. But their attitude is, "come to us, don't bother with the newspaper."

Our local school district has a PR person who has never sent a single press release in two and a half years, and never pitches stories to the local media. His attitude is, "you want to find out what's going on? Check out our own content." The quality is often facepalm-inducing and mistake-filled, but that's irrelevant to the fact that "we're producing our own for free, you don't have to rely on the paper anymore."

 

Not all beats require two people, so probably fewer than that will be needed. High school and small college sports will never be covered by city papers again. Small towns ... they'll cover them until the doors are shuttered. Most small town papers and medium sized will be closing soon cause of no advertising at all.

 

Lot of truth here. Yes, the newspaper Websites are competing with the schools. Schools seem to be still willing to share the information; not sure how long that will last. Schools frankly need to hire a lot more sports writers from newspapers and let them put the newspapers out of business. The schools that do hire sportswriters seem to make poor use of them. Until schools figure it out, and they will, newspapers and school PR can coexist (barely).
You are right about the suits. They've ended prep coverage and small college coverage because of the expert way you stated it. I'm surprised high schools don't all have a policy of refusing all media at events and ordering all coaches to never speak to media again unless approved. Why? Newspapers now only come around the high schools if there's a budding scandal. The games and personalities are not being covered anymore because of supposed lack of pageviews/interest.
This whole pageviews thing doesnt seem to be helping newspapers much, does it? If newspapers did a good job as they did in the past people would come. Greedy business managers got sick of dealing with the spread sheets regarding cost of newsprint and to save their jobs pretty much started the plot to kill newspapers. Cut people, cut sections of the paper, cut the favorite writers and you save sooooooo much on evil newsprint costs.
Your post was excellent and spot on.

 

It would certainly seem to be the case around here. The local beat guy is an endangered species. They'd rather have people working remotely for peanuts who are pretending to have a major beat.

 

I assume that print is dying.

And I think a good news website must be posting throughout the day. Are people going to subscribe to a website that only updates occasionally? And how much local content can three or four staffers working at a small town paper post? Even if they work as hard as Fredrick? How many people in the local market will instead subscribe to a large city metro with a lot more news and sports content updated more frequently? Is there enough money left in a small market for the local product?

I think small papers will have a hard time competing in a web only world and they will die. Maybe the larger papers will hire stringers to cover high school and small college sports but I doubt it.

 

My golden rule of sports writing: Find a way to be essential to your readers. Much harder to get axed if you are essential and a lot easier to find a good landing spot afterward.

 

Don't undervalue what preps do for metros. At The Denver Post, for instance, even without a dedicated preps reporter, a preps story would generate more subscriptions on average than any sports beat. In Charlotte, preps stories drive significant traffic and serious subscription numbers. Does it help having a local legend cover preps here? Yes. But if he wasn't writing stories people were interested in, they wouldn't be paying for them. Having a good preps reporter who is dedicated to their job can easily pay for itself.

 

So the decision not to have a dedicated prep reporter in Denver was economically irrational?