Bloodletting at Lee papers in Greensboro, Winston-Salem

We had 20 schools in our core area. Once upon a time, we had a reporter or a stringer at every game, which would be 8-12 games a weekend. Granted, because of stadium situations, Saturday games were common and some Thursday night games crept into the schedule.

Now there are maybe two games a night covered, sometimes 3 depending on the stringer situation. .

 

I was a stringer at a very good midsized paper 15-20 years ago and we covered 10-15 games a night, easily. It felt like you had to be playing more than an hour away for there to even be the chance of us not covering it. We didn't have a Sunday paper but if there was a big game on Saturday, we were still there and we did a thorough follow/sidebar for Monday. Times have changed.

 

We had a thread one time on how much reader interest there was in high school sports. The consensus was that readers were very interested in their local school and not very interested in high school sports in general. So readers who lived in the Doormat High School district would read about there school getting beat. But they would not read a story on rivals Megapower High playing Football Factory High for the conference championship.

Is this generalization true? Because if it is that means that the number of page views drop dramatically as coverage is cutback. Which leads to the conclusion that maybe a paper should abandon high school coverage all together and instead, insert material about the local major league professional sports teams and the local D-1 schools.

 

Preps get many more page views in my market. It’s not even close.

 

You were publishing 2-day old gamers and sidebars on regular season high school football games? Wow.

 

1. It was 2002. Life was different then.
2. We'd usually break out one thing from the game and go with 15 inches on it for Monday. Definitely not a gamer-style presentation.

 

I was cleaning out some old boxes and came across some papers from 2000-2010, so not ancient history, especially on the 2010 end. But man, it felt like ancient history, with how big sports staffs were, the range of things covered, the treasures to be had in a fat Sunday section, simply how essential it all felt. If you wanted to know what people were buzzing about, you had to read the paper, had to know what that columnist thought, had to read that big feature on the star player.

Preaching to the choir, I know, but it scares me how unessential newspapers have made themselves. I left newspapers 2+ years ago and I'm embarrassed how little I rely on the local paper. I never would have guessed that when busting my ass working there.

 

It's so sad what greed, expansion, etc., did to Lee. When I started there in 1979 they owned only about 13 newspapers (Madison was the biggest) and it was a good corporation to work for, with a decent benefits program. With the numerous splits, etc., I made a ton of money from the employee stock purchase program for the first 20 years or so that financed the down payment on my house, a new roof, etc. They also matched my contribution to my 401K (up to 6%) and the stock dividend was a nice quarterly bonus.

 

Speaking of stringers for HS football (or hoops) games, what is the going pay rate today for what amounts to working 3.5-4 hours?

 

Last couple years... A New England daily, around 3,700 circulation now, paid me $75. So did a weekly out here in Texas, I believe. Both would want the story within a couple hours for their website. A small weekly in New England would pay me $50 - looser deadline requirements.

 

Big city sports pages are 2-4 page sections now. The Web stories allegedly have no following, no pageviews. So big cities in many instances have fired all high school reporters. That's one big LOL to the consultants who stopped feeding stories for mommies, daddies and grandpas and grandpas who liked to read about their kids and grandkids. Newspapers are dead; at least eliminate the print product completely and get on with the burial process.

 

Layoffs at the Lee Montana papers today.