Big Doings in Dallas

There are at least 10 better places to read about the Cowboys than the Dallas Morning News.

When the Dallas Cowboys can't even help you maintain an edge anymore, in a town like that, you're in big big trouble.

 

Agreed. And as much as it pains me to say it, because I love the DMN, one of those places is the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

 

The other difference is the Raleigh/Durham scenario was before the K-R takeover. It's the picture of McClatchy's M.O. The question is whether that M.O. will remain the status quo in the new era of McClatchy. I hope so.

 

Presumably, those things are supposed to award the papers that are serving the readers. We can't all read every paper every day, so APSE is a way to hold everyone a little bit accountable. It's by no means a perfect system, but it's what we have.

 

Every survey I've seen has said the opposite.

 

Bubbler is clapping from the gallery. Great post, Shottie, typo aside.

Ask 99.99 percent our readers what an APSE award is. They'll stop for a moment, scratch their head, and say something like, "The American Political Science Endowment?"

And, yeah, I've won one. And I enter them. It's a nice industry standard, but if you base news judgment on winning awards, your head is not in the right place. Not once have I ever made a news decision as a SE that had its genesis in the thought of winning an award.

 

I've been in Gannett, and the mantra was that other than some big events, sports was way down on the list of what drew and kept readers (paper arriving on doorstep before 5:30 was always near the top, FWIW).

 

Let's go back to first principles. If sports don't help sell papers, why do almost all papers (Wall Street Journal the exception) print a sport section every day?

 

Every survey I've ever seen, including ones from corporate types who have every reason to keep sports budgets down, said it drives circulation. The company I work for now, thankfully, works on that principle within reason.

The rub is what part of the sports coverage drives it? That's when you get into the dogmatic wars between those who think only local or those who tilt too far on national coverage.

This has always amused me. I find it funny that our industry does so much hand-wringing over these surveys and trying to deconstruct the readers, instead of accepting the common sense notion that 100 different people pick up the paper for 100 different things. It's our eternal advantage over every other medium.

It's especially so in sports. I get calls about local sports results, Busch agate, you name it, you can't categorize reader priority other than truly obvious things like having a major college or pro team in your town. No paper, no local sports preference ever fits a one-size-fits-all mentality for newspapers.

 

I don't think that argument will get you very far because why do they have local/business/features sections, too?

A better one is this: Why is it anytime the local team does good, do newspapers splash it across 1A. The Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel and Palm Beach Post all had 1As devoted to the Heat winning the title. And that was it. And they all did comemorative special sections on the championship season.

 

Pardon me for barging into this topic, but I have worked at newspapers and love them dearly, so here goes.

The biggest problem with the newspaper sports section boils down to 3 words: No late scores. There's nothing more frustrating than picking up the morning paper and not being able to find out who won. It literally drives a person to the remote control or the computer.

Wishing, cursing and begging the leagues to start the games earlier? Futile. Ain't gonna happen.

Not only is the time-gap a problem, the gas-powered delivery method is expensive as hell.

Deliver the written word digitally either from computer to printed page or directly to a hand-held device, and multiple problems are solved.

As soon as newspapers figure out how to do it, the sports sections will ride high again.

 

Good points, though I don't necessarily believe newspapers are flying low just yet.

What's going to be interesting is the homogenization of media into one big form. The distinctions between TV, print and radio will be blurred out of all recognition sooner than later. It's already happening.

At our paper, we shoot occasional streaming video and provide podcasts, unheard of as recently as half-a-decade ago. Obviously, those are things TV and radio both do better, but now we're doing it because we can, because we have to.

Moreover, TV has had to face the reality of the web too. Their advantage in the visual medium helps greatly, but the visual image isn't enough on the web. The 1-minute report on a news cast doesn't really fit the web, read a "news story" re-written from the nightly news, its like the reading the first three graphs of an AP writethru, you get the basics only.

Nor will the random, video-without-context that often accompanies many local sports highlights on newscasts cut it. People aren't going to settle just for seeing Junior in action at some random point of the second quarter or something, they're going to want to see Junior hitting the winning shot. That will affect TV's ability to shoot 20 games in one night -- one of their major psychological advantages over print -- and it will play into the hands of newspapers, who already have an apparatus in place to deal with those parameters.

TV is going to need to reconnoiter its resources too. It will become more text-driven (and right now, it doesn't have the writers to pull it off) as the traditional media explores non-print avenues.

Radio has seemingly ignored it all, and radio as a news-gathering medium is dying on the vine. Discounting satellite radio, of course.