Blogs and the future of sportswriting

I've had a blog as part of my beat since fall of 2005. To me the question now is the one you pose to reporters who have a beat and don't have a blog to complement their coverage in the paper: Why not?

 

Define "a lot." If your newspaper has a daily circulation of, say, 300K, you cover high schools in a broad sense, or maybe even zone it, but you do not have a writer for every high school or game stories every day for every school because there's no way revenue would justify it. It's a target audience, but it's too small to attract advertising to support the expense of in-depth coverage.

There have long been team-owned and even some indy weeklies devoted to a single pro football team. Obviously they are profitable, but if they were very profitable major newspapers either would have started competing weeklies or bought exisiting ones. And in every major metro's market there are small weeklies that have managed to stay in business by getting 1.) the small advertisers who can't afford to advertise in the big daily and 2.) the advertisers who aren't very good about paying their bills, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. At some point the large daily decided these advertisers just aren't worth the manpower, effort and expense needed to court these small fish and service their tiny accounts. We can't swim after every minnow -- it is much more cost-effective to focus on the bigger fish. If the blog has a few thousand readers, what does that mean in a market of 1 million? Not much.

 

Is there any evidence blogs make money for newspapers? If not, do they help sell newspapers? If not ...

Sincerely,
Small-town guy

 

To support the in-depth coverage? Isn't the reporter already covering the team ...? I'd say ask someone like Hoops on what the "cost" is for this.

There are blogs that I know (in medium-sized markets) of which will get thousands of page views per day ... and depending on the day and what is happening, over 10,000.

And for the record, I am not talking about having a blog for every prep team (although an overall prep blog is a good idea), but one for a pro/college team.

I also ask - how many people actually read the sports story of said team? There's no way of knowing who reads what in the paper of course, but there are metrics available online. I've seen (successful) blogs which have more hits, about the same and roughly 1/3.

And to Chameleon - People have to stop dividing the line between newspaper and online and think of it as one big family, not separate products. And yes, this goes for both sides.

 

So we should just add more work to the reporter's load for, let's see, no extra pay?

Or the reporter could just do a crappier job for the product that pays the bills so he can write his blog and still not go overtime?

Something's gotta give, don't you think?

 

Agreed Frank. My paper is in the process of overhauling our Web site. Our EE wants our section to start doing blogs, podcasts, video - the works.

Sounds all well and good. But I don't want to hear complaints when I file for overtime.

 

Frank Ridgeway has pretty much said what I'd say, only better, but I have a question that someone might be able to answer:

How much are these blogs done by newspaper beat reporters being read? Can someone supply any facts and figures?

I don't think they're a good use of a reporter's time, for the reason Frank mentioned -- the reporter is taking time to write leftover information for a very small percentage of his/her readership.

 

there are plenty of programs out there that tell you exactly how many hits or page views anything on your web gets.

bottom line is that our industry is shifting to the web and we can either try to scramble to the top deck or sit in steerage and grumble.

 

Ace: I don't have a blog (thank God), and I write for a website, not edit one, so I don't have access to that information. I'm just curious if people with a blog know if the public is reading what they write. I know there are good newspaper blogs out there (like the NYT's baseball blog), but I have no idea how appealing they are.

 

Check with the geeky folks who run the site. I bet they can give you a count.

 

I'll jump into this one -- and I even have a few numbers to throw out there. I've been doing a blog for my paper since Fall 2005. I cover a perennial Top 20 college football team. Here are a couple of things to consider:
1) Profitability: The blogs bring hits to a newspaper's site, which is what pleases advertisers online.
2) It's not just emptying out the notebook. I often put things up on my blog before it goes in the paper (typically cleared by my editor as to whether it goes in the blog or just online or both).
3) Frank keeps mentioning a paper's circulation area. Well, this is where you're WAYYYY off base. I've got readers of my blog from all across the country. It's not just about my tiny 180,000 population/60,000 circ. That's what you have to understand. That's the nature of the Internet. It's everywhere. There are alums everywhere -- and they crawl the Net to find any tidbit on their team.
4) Back to emptying that notebook. How many times have you had a neat nugget that got cut because of space constrictions? This is a chance to prevent that from happening. Last season, almost all of our mid-week notebooks (my beat and our other major college coverage) were shuffled online for lack of space. Blogging is more than emptying a notebook.
5) Blogging is also a chance to personalize things for readers. I have readers who know and like my style. And believe me, it took a while to get away from the strict AP reporting style (or even feature writing, which does have my "voice") and come up with a voice for the blog. As mentioned earlier, Hoops has an excellent blog and an excellent voice and I know many more beat writers who do, as well.
6) Last, but not least, the question of who cares? I'm not picking at you Frank or Kato for asking that, but if you've ever been to a football game down South, seen the interest among SEC fans, you don't have to ask that question. These folks are INSANE in what they want to know. And I'm sure it's that way with some pro teams as well.

Ike: You asked about numbers. Well, I went back and grabbed some numbers my tech guy sent me earlier in the year. These are very modest numbers, but considering all the other avenues the fans of the team I cover have at their disposal (heavy rivals and scouts coverage and 10 other newspapers) they're not bad.
So, here are some numbers from my blog (first number is hits, second is unique visitors):

August 15,225/10,972
Sept. 9,936/7,106
Oct. 12,361/8,907
Nov. 12,416/8,987
Dec. 8,225/5,893
Jan. 23,998/15,324

I feel sure that there are other blogs out there with FAR superior numbers to these of a 60,000 circ paper.

Oh, and I don't get compensated for the extra time each day to do my blog (in-season). I'm salaried anyway, so it wouldn't matter. I work 60 hours a week, 7 days a week during football season anyway, so what's another 30 minutes to put up something cool on my blog?

 

But advertisers are not interested in these people. This is one reason why many newspapers have cut their out-of-area circulation -- advertisers do not want to pay an inflated rate to reach people who live too far away to visit their store. So it is not a smart thing to brag that a lot of your hits come from far away -- it makes advertisers wonder why they should pay X amount when Y number of hits are completely useless. And if advertisers view half your hits as worthless, what good are they to the paper?