Benmaller.com: LA Times to drop hockey road coverage for Ducks and Kings

Has the Times heard of Hotwire, fer Christ's sake? (I once had to spend a week in Louisville covering the Junior Softball World Series and researched my own hotel rates. I came back with a $26 per night rate that turned out to be Candlewood Suites. Had a great time there, room was just fine.)

Granted, LATimes and its writers are a far cry from what I just posted, but the bottom line (no pun intended) is there ARE good bargains out there just waiting to be plucked.

 

This was posted on the Raleigh paper's blog during the Stanley Cup final. Interesting

Lockout's impact lingers in lack of ink
This series has been quite gratifying for the NHL's lockout hard-liners, with two small-market teams battling for the Stanley Cup that may not have survived had the league's old economic system lasted.

But shutting down the league for a year has had a very tangible impact on U.S. coverage of the Stanley Cup finals. Only eight U.S. newspapers outside of the state of North Carolina traveled to Edmonton — USA Today, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Denver Post and the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

A few other papers covered the games in Raleigh, but the absentees here are striking: No Detroit. No Chicago. No Dallas. No Washington. No Atlanta. No Florida. No Tampa Bay. No San Jose. No St. Louis. No Buffalo.

(No Detroit? Hockeytown my butt.)

For those keeping score at home, that's two Original Six cities (including five newspapers that travel with NHL teams) and the city of the defending champions (two papers, none present).

The N&O hasn't covered a finals without the Canes since 2001, but when none of these big-market papers sees the Stanley Cup finals as worth covering, the assessment of and damage to the NHL's national profile is incalcuable.

On the ice, the lockout may have changed the NHL for the better, and there's no question it has lined owners' pockets with more money. But when not only ESPN but the biggest papers in the United States ignore the most exciting Stanley Cup finals in a decade, there's no telling the damage done to the game's presence south of the border.

 

Hard to argue with that. In places where the local team didn't even make the playoffs, the NHL season had been over for two months before the uninspiring Edmonton-Carolina Final with balky travel. How much interest is there in an Edmonton-Carolina Final, and how unique is your content going to be if you send your own writer?

Some of the cities listed have baseball teams that might last a while in the postseason and some of them are football-mad places. All things considered, I'd vote to save my money for other priorities, too.

 

Uninspiring? Did you watch any of the games?

As for why the two major Ottawa dailies weren't covering the final, their corporate owners also own the two big dailies in Edmonton. So I'm sure the Ottawa papers had coverage, it just wasn't their own.

 

The lack of coverage sucks for the NHL, but they took drastic steps to reconfigure their economic model and at least give themselves a shot at survival and prosperity. The newspaper industry doesn't seem to have any grand plan, so we just watch the steady drip of erosion.

 

I've seen this suggested elsewhere, but I think it overlooks something: Deadlines. How many beat writers realistically have the cushion to do this - I know many beats who have to file as soon as the game is over, or within half an hour. That's not much time to take a different angle, since in many cases that can't be done until the outcome of the game is known, and there's been time to linger in the locker room. I agree gamers are old news by the next day, but I don't know that beat writers have the luxury to write "different angle" stories (except maybe nfl writers, since many of those games have an early afternoon start. But not nba and nhl writers, and mlb writers covering evening games).

 

JR ... I've said this before, but not everyone who cares about a particular team has time to a) watch that night's game or b) watch SportsCenter for the highlights. The only people writing "straight gamers" are stringers doing high school games. Professional beat writers are for the most part finding perspective and telling the "why" of the game as much as the "what." That's why we still write gamers. It's our job to still make it relevant in the morning.

Think of it this way: How many people who have to get up at 5 a.m. for a commute into the city the next morning are staying up until 1030 or 11 watching the baseball game that night? They're not watching the evening news, either. That's a lot of our readership right there ...