AJC and Hartford Courant not covering Super Bowl

I've never worked harder than I did Super Bowl week. Never. It is a grind-and-a-half. The only day that's halfway sedate is the Saturday before the game, but only because the Bataan Death March pace you work at in the days before.

But I see the other side too. At some point, a paper can't spend money it doesn't have just for prestige purposes. Save it for the core stuff, which is why it bothers me more that the AJC isn't road covering Georgia hoops -- shitty or not -- than the Super Bowl.

Good post, OTD. I think it would be interesting to pose the question to the readers. Something like ... Do you mind if the AJC doesn't staff cover the Super Bowl and uses wire and news service coverage? Is AJC-produced Super Bowl coverage valued by you?

That's what I'd like to see, but it'll never happen, and THAT'S why our business sucks, because we communciate horribly with our customers, or, we do it in such a half-assed or cynical, loaded way to make "reader surveys" a means to a preordained end.

 

Tell that to The Dallas Times-Herald, Baltimore News-American, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Miami News --- among hundreds (thousands?) of others. Those papers died long before anyone ever typed in "http://www . . . " for their news.

Honestly, it seems sometimes like everyone's point of reference is 1990 and beyond. Yes, some newspapers were gold mines. But the industry has been shedding people for decades. We just happen to hear about every freaking cut from Yuma to Corpus Christi today.

I know someone who worked at both the Baltimore News-American and Dallas Times-Herald.

Let him tell you how wonderful things were for newspapers in the 1980s.

 

The Palm Beach Post sent two people to Tampa.
The only difference in costs for both papers is travel. The same food, hotel and transmission costs.
It would seem wiser to send one staffer from each paper. A columnist would be preferred, because of the high profile nature of that person.
Would it be wiser to cut back on Super BVowl space to send a person. Two pages on the Monday after the game instead of four, for example.

 

I believe most of those papers were evening papers, which did shut down as morning papers became preferred. I also know that in a lot of cases, the competing crosstown morning paper picked up many of those people, particularly writers and columnists, and heavily advertised that.

 

Nothing ridiculous about it. Columnists and their appeal is no where near what it was even 10 years ago. They aren't drawing in readers like they once did. As far as giving their opinion on a game or an event, I think people can draw their own conclusions about what they saw live on TV. They don't necessarily need someone to explain it to them. Sort of like the way an announcer repeats the same thing over and over.
I'm not saying that we should do away with columnists. I'm saying that they don't formulate public opinion like they once did.
Just my take. Might not be shared by many.

 

So, 10 years ago, people couldn't form their own opinions about what they saw? I don't get it. I'd agree they aren't drawing in readers like they once did, but what is? Maybe if we gave readers more unique content (like columns) there'd be a reason to read the paper. There's certainly a lot more opinion out there, but if you have a good columnist, I think the reader still cares what he thinks. And he/she should be able to write something worth reading from the Super Bowl.

 

I go back much further than 10 years. I just used that as a starting point. 10 years ago, the media wasn't like it is today. I just feel that people don't want to here what someone else thinks about a game or an event they have seen.
It's like watching the presidential debate. I didn't need a talking head or columnist to tell me what the candidates said. I didn't need someone telling me what they thiink the candidates meant. I could formulate my own opinion.

 

The early 1980s were pretty horrible. The place I was working -- dead now -- was the kind of place where we showed up at noon on paydays so we could cash the checks immediately because we all expected this could be the week when they'd bounce. And we still sent one person to the Super Bowl.

If you've never had the chance to read Stanley Woodward's "Sports Page," he makes an alternate case for staffing big events, beyond his belief that his readers were sophisticated enough to demand it even if no local team is involved. He also suggested that you'll never get the best from a staff if you don't give it a chance to stretch itself, to work those muscles and make them bigger. You keep telling a staff that sending them to a Super Bowl is a waste of money because any wire-service writer or anyone from some other paper on the supplemental wires can do it just as well, it won't be too long before they start to believe it. Some of the responses on this thread being Exhibit A. If you're any kind of a leader, you either have to believe your people can do it better than anyone else's people, or you'd better be damned good at faking orgasm sometimes and acting as if they can. Because if you don't, you are going to destroy the staff's confidence and ambition, and what will you have left after that?

 

Pretty damned smart for somebody liquored up on vacation, lad.

Of course, I'm liquored up -- well, wined -- in town taking a brief look at the board while my new best friend is asleep.

 

I think you just proved the point, playthrough. NEWSPAPER columnists are not of concern. They're too busy being screaming voices or being associated with something other than the newspaper.

Those who are newspaper-only guys don't have nearly the national cache guys had 10 years ago. IMO, anyway.

 

At the risk of outing myself, I was at the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia. What made the 1980s rough in my opinion is that you were entering the computer age. Back then computers were still a mystery and I think I may still have a TI and a Teleram somewhere in my basement.
This is another step in the evolution process of getting information out to the masses. I remember when it was a big deal to get a telegram. Now, anyone under 21 has no idea what one is.