Mlive: Letting parents cost their kids scholarships

MLive's approach to high schools is a great example of why newspapers are dead, buried, irrelevant, fill in the blank.

 

Matt, I've got to agree that was a damn nice print treatment of state track. Big-time.

We've taken to live blogging in the comments section of an online story at events like this, too. It's a huge boon for online coverage. You can provide the news instanteously.

 

Everyone wants more local high school sports coverage until their kid graduates. If you are a paper with a regional bent -- 20 plus towns -- I find high school sports problematic. The problem is many of the people who are die-hard high school sports readers leave that section when their kid stops playing. Day-to-day game coverage to me is asinine. Write features, issues, and when the major game comes up -- cover it.

Same is true for local news. If you are a 20 town paper, you can't fill your section with mundane coverage in town. Feature and run-of-the-mill town stories are relevant to only those in town or who have a connection unless it's a real good story. Most basic news -- town meetings and government -- is irrelevant to the next town. That's the theory behind zoning editions, but that's a cost-cutting move that made sense on a balance sheet.

If you have a major regional team -- pro and major college -- go with that. Best bang for your buck.

Corporate managers went with the local, local, local coverage because I think they thought it would be cheaper. No. To do local right costs so much more and takes so many more resources.

 

You hit this square. Local also doesn't "scale," which media companies are starting to learn the hard way.

 

It depends on the area. Some places high school sports are a big social event for the entire town. And they want to know how the teams are doing. (At least for basketball and football -- folks may not care so much about track or field hockey).

And some big private schools have alums who follow those teams forever.

But other schools once the kids leave, the parents stop caring.

 

Someone needs to figure this out once and for all.

I wonder how accurately high schools tabulate and then maintain, for example, attendance figures.

 

For purposes of readership, I don't know that attendance matters so much, but it's probably a good barometer. High school coverage also may drive web traffic from people who moved away but want to keep up.

I do think if you have standout teams or athletes it helps increase readership.

 

My buddy is a varsity coach in a "MLive area" and he was a former SE of a few newspapers. His team's under-.500 season is very well documented. He did it very fair, but every game got "covered" with a well-written, unbiased 300-400 words.