Is your paper cutting back on prep football coverage?

If it's any consolation, I find football to be much easier than basketball when having to keep notes while taking pictures. Get to be really good friends with the stat keeper, because you will miss somethings here and there.

 

The Slappy Pipeline had a conversation with the other side of this story this morning, moments ago in fact.
Seems the other side of the story was a little discouraged about the way chazp has represented this discussion.
It appears that chazp called to ask for help; that his weekly couldn't cover every game and wanted a story swap with the News. That's when someone was told that the News was scaling back the area and wouldn't have many games that it would need from the weekly paper. Many of 15 or so schools that wouldn't be covered (as opposed to the 50-something that will be covered) aren't necessarily close to the main area; some are close and that's regretable. But in all cases, those schools would be able to call in their football games and still have them appear in the paper. In actuality, most of those 15 schools had someone call in anyway; some of them -- up to 75 miles away -- never called at all.
As was mentioned in other threads, the News took a hit with losing two sports interns who covered preps and not replacing the sports part-timer when he got a full-time job. That's more than 100 man-hours a week in actuality, probably closer to 130 in reality, devoted to preps. Something has to give.
I can say with exact certainty that Mr. Sentell is not happy with someone for taking what he thought was a private conversation and having it appear in a public forum -- especially since that someone was the person asking him for help in covering his handful of teams. He did encourage me to present the other side of chazp's story.

 

coughDMNcough....

 

Oh, as for us, high school football still drives the bus, so until I'm told otherwise, it's full speed ahead. The only concession I'm going to make is I'm cutting out roundups for games we don't staff and letting the boxscores stand for themselves. That gives us the space in the paper for two more stories to string and in retrospect, doing roundups + boxscores seems like wasted effort.

 

We're cutting back slightly in our coverage - not covering some of the "fringe" towns in our circ. Kind of sucks, but it's more of a space concern. We just can't send anyone out to cover their games - and with 70 prep teams playing Friday night, it had to be done.

Our stringer budget has been hacked to almost nothing, so we're treading water there. In fact, our staffing just took a hit and we're losing desk guys fast. We haven't had the fall discussion yet, but I'm hoping my boss doesn't tether the prep guy to the desk and cover the season with stringers.

 

LOL!

 

All I can say is that the tab is down to 32 from 40, and there are five schools that would normally get previews that are not.

 

Our circulation area shrunk quite a bit this year, with the result that we shed about 10 fringe schools.

But our core area hasn't changed. We still have three large public schools, three mid-sized public schools, two small public schools and two private schools, plus we still have about 8-9 outer-lying schools (mostly mid-sized) that we'll hit a few times, depending on how good they are (and we usually have one or two that are near-championship caliber).

Most Fridays, we staff three, sometimes four games, and take calls from the rest. We also have arrangements with some other papers to swap stories if some of our bigger schools are playing big games out of the area, and vice versa. And we'll put anybody who calls in the roundup, but except for the three biggest schools, we don't chase anybody down.

 

Our tab is the same way (down 8 pages), but we managed to get all our high schools in, save for one which we discovered we don't even throw papers in that town.

 

How does that happen?
Did anyone at the school ever question why you guys were calling/coming out?

 

We're a man down from last football season, so we're having to scale back coverage of the smaller and outlying schools. Basically, we're focusing on bigger schools and hitting the suburbs when the big schools head out of town.

And thanks to losing that person, I'm having to dust off the reporters' notebooks and cover the local D-II school. Anybody know how to write a volleyball gamer?