No, you CAN'T root in the damn press box

I used to have that argument all the time with the GM of the Carolina League team in Lynchburg. He got super pissy any time we didn't write a traditional gamer and wouldn't hear the argument that people didn't care about who won the game. He got exceptionally angry any time we did a feature on a player from the opposing team coming through town. Well, people are interested when Freddie Freeman comes through with Myrtle Beach, or Manny Machado through Frederick, or Mookie Betts through Salem. The point of high-A ball at that time was the chance to see really high-level prospects, and we leaned into that. There are ways to cover the home team without resorting to gamers. Hell, even the managers of those teams were hamstrung in terms of winning or losing the games. If the parent club wanted to see X pitcher throw in the 7th inning, that's what they did, regardless of score. There is an interesting way to cover minor league ball. Straight gamers ain't it.

Playoffs, though, different animal. But also, look at the crowds for the playoffs. Lynchburg played a clinching game once in front of about 400 fans. No promotions? No one cares.

 

Yeah, promotions and looking at the highly touted players who will be there (for the home and visiting teams) always seemed to provide a little boost.

With features, if you could get some time to go in-depth with the Cuban pitcher on the roster, or the undrafted guy sho has overcome all odds, a ton of injuries, to make it to the cusp of the big leagues, can be great features that make an impact.

The problem we ran into was, with gamers not resonating, the bosses wouldn't like us to go to the stadium at all. Then when you wanted to parachute in and get these guys to really open up and tell you personal tales about their struggles and journey, it could be tough for them to let their guard down and open up because they basically don't know you.

Little bit of a Catch-22 - you can't get the great access and cooperation without being there regularly.

 

One thing that drives me insane about the idea of basing editorial decisions on web traffic is that it's hard to know exactly what's going to hit a nerve. We have rehashed press releases that get a lot of traffic, and in-depth stuff people say they want more of that gets nothing. Stuff gets buried by social media algorithms. I had one story this summer that I thought would do well and after several hours it had ZERO views — not low traffic, but literally no traffic. And then our biggest story this past week has been a rewritten release about the state police's Labor Day enforcement period.
I've had features that won press association awards get very few readers, and three-paragraph briefs get several thousand.
I think, when it comes to coverage, you also have to keep the long game in mind. If you go all-in on one beat or subject because it's driving traffic, you might be ignoring another that will do the same a few months down the line. In the meantime, you've annoyed that second beat and possibly harmed your relationship with the people who follow it. Just because the metrics say nobody cares about a subject doesn't mean they don't or won't, and you have to keep cultivating those relationships.

It all comes back to news judgment and making the best decisions you can. And then after that, throwing the occasional bucket of paint at the wall and seeing if something connects. Realizing that readers are fickle helps, too. Basically, the same principles we've always followed but in a fancy new package.

 

There was a whole philosophical shift, at some point, where a bunch of people in charge of making decisions dismissed game stories as outdated and not relevant. "They can get it anywhere." "The people who care about it are already there." That sort of thing. And maybe the online metrics bear that out to some degree.

What those folks never seemed to grasp is that banging out those stories isn't necessarily about that game. It's about showing your face so that, when the time comes to do a feature or break news, you can do a more effective job because these people know you and trust you. It's the same with any beat. If you're on the cops beat and show up to a wreck or fire or a minor disturbance, there's value in that because now the cops and firemen know you and tell you stuff — maybe even stuff they don't realize they're telling you, which leads to bigger and better stories.

Game stories are like doing reps in the gym so that you can win a major competition down the line. Yeah, they can be tedious and boring. But if you don't do them you're not going to be ready when it counts.

 

Back in the day, we had a Class A team that drew flies, except for promotion nights. We had an old sportswriter who had covered the team forever and if there were 4,500 people there because of a promotion, that was in the lead. If there were 50 there on a frozen April night, the only way to see that was in the box score (we ran box scores with updated batting averages each night!!!!). Once one of our copy editors inserted a crowd of something like 75 into the lead and the old guy about had a seizure. I think he thought he was covering MLB or something like that.

 

I started at the Rome News-Tribune a month or two before the Class A Braves debuted there. That first season and into the next, we blew it out big and at least then the crowds justified it. Sent someone to Florida for a week of spring training to gather tab stories, went on the road for the All-Star game, covered the playoffs home and away. The beat writer was issued enough travelers checks(!!) to allow him to make it from Hickory, N.C. to Eastlake, Ohio should the Braves advance to the championship round, which they did.

The best story on the team I got all season was from a news-side writer whose piece they couldn’t fit on 1A during the playoffs due to all the other Braves mania coverage there. (The ME was a baseball nut, and nuts in general.) Talked about a local family that was pressed into emergency service as player hosts because the apartment leases expired with the regular season.

 

We still ran a supplemental info box with relevant game info, turning points, a postgame quote, etc. It would look silly if the home team won with a walkoff grand slam not to have some record of that with a quote from the hero. We were still there every day. We just didn't bog readers down in the minutiae of things unnecessarily.

 

I feel this so much. I am currently the editor of a B2B website and while I do not have pressure to significantly grow the site right this instant, it is constantly on my mind, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what gets traffic and what doesn't. A company has some news that gets thousands of views and then that same company has something a few weeks later and it barely hits 100. I have several days worth of stories that get really decent, consistent traffic and right in the middle is something, that was a good freaking story with awesome information, that has 37 page views.

Some day I will figure out how to get most things at least on that consistent level. Editorially, though, I figure if I just keep getting quality content up it will all trickle down. I have seen that impact as slow as it sometimes goes.

 

Same thing for the local indy ball teams here. They'll draw 5500 for fireworks night on a summer Saturday. Playoffs? We've been to games where we had an entire section to ourselves. And to follow up @BurnsWhenIPee's point, we were probably the only ones that could tell you who won the game as we walked out. Certainly the only ones to tell you which inning the winning run was scored. It's a strange beast and a frustrating one if you are a writer with bigger ambitions hoping to prove yourself in the bushes.

 

I just want to say thanks for these insights this last page or two. I took up a spot helping a local low-level semipro soccer club this past spring and realize now my "old school" mentality (started writing in 2006) toward gamers needs to go if we are going to drive people to read more (and hopefully attend matches)

 

I honestly don't know if readers even noticed at that time, other than my family. Was definitely strange writing in the third person but also quite fun. Luckily I wasn't a star or anything on the team so didn't often have to write about myself. And the only time I ever choked--missing 2 free throws when up 1 with 6 seconds left against the team that went on to win the JUCO national title--I redeemed myself by stealing it from the guy who rebounded it and then flinging the ball toward the ceiling to run out the clock in my homage to Magic against Portland in Game 6 of the 1991 WCF Finals (didn't add that Magic detail in the gamer).

But the first few months at the junior college set me on my life path, such as it was. Walked into the paper a few weeks into school to see if they needed help. Learned a ton in those first two years, from the sports editor, the news editor, the two other full-timers in sports, their part-timer who had been the longtime sports editor and the whole night crew on the news side. And at school, the JUCO journalism prof was the former news editor at the daily paper, who'd been there when it was considered one of the finest small-town papers in the country (by the time I got there it was a Thomson paper and wasn't what it once was). Learned so much from him and he was also my English prof so he influenced my life and changed it for the better. Me and three other kids in the journalism class and the other three probably had never read a newspaper in their life unless it was to check if one of their arrests had made it into the sheriff's log. The school actually had a school paper where I served as the editor, sports editor, news reporter, sportswriter, photographer, designer, copy editor and circulation manager. A one-man shop for two years while getting to cover high school and college games for the daily paper.

Invaluable experience, which translated into a cool 18K-a-year gig when they hired me full-time a few years later after I graduated from my four-year.

One other fun story from those years: When I worked part-time at the paper while going to school, the night editor was this awesome girl fresh out of college. Super fun, smart, funny and kindly bought me beers at the company Christmas party. She's now a top editor at the New York Times and her and her family live 10 minutes from us and we're great friends again, 30 years after first working together in rural Minnesota.

 

I try and get to a few Brooklyn Cyclones games a year. There are a few diehards for sure--the old guy with his scorebook, folks checking out Mets prospects (hey, they sometimes exist), the insane Italian family we sat behind once who knew the details of every player on the team and were booing the opposition for nine innings while also complaining that one of the between-inning contests wasn't fair to the white kid competitor because it involved a sprint against a black kid--but otherwise I don't think anyone's real worried about the outcome. They did draw a ridiculous crowd for Seinfeld bobblehead night though.