Scouter said:
Four days into the fall sports season (only practices; not even games) and I have some yahoo commenting on a story that we need to give more coverage to the other teams at the big school in our coverage area.
I've written two stories since the season (which, again, is four days old) began: the football team's first day of practice (with a new head coach) and a feature on a former head football coach at the school who's come back as an assistant.
Unforkingbelievable.
I was wondering today if it were possible, with the gold mine of web metrics we have at our disposal, to really deeply evaluate exactly what people read and then develop coverage from there. For instance, if volleyball stories get 10 percent as many readers as a football story, maybe we should only be spending 10 percent of our time on that sport. If three people read a track meet gamer and 1,000 read the baseball preview, then maybe it shows we should be at the track meet the next time and covering that baseball game instead. If one high school's combined readership accounts for far less than the proportion of your time you spend on it, should you trim that significantly? I know that doesn't account for people who get the print edition, but it's probably not far from it.
With those numbers, it also would be vindicating to tell the Little Suzy's mom the reason we weren't at Suzy's swim meet was because the last time we did a girls swimming gamer it had four views while the softball team that played that day is literally of 155 times more interest, per web data.
And is this just a case of the chicken and the egg, where more coverage means more future interest? Or is that true in some cases, like with a high school in general, and not others, like swim gamers?
I'm just putting a thought out there, so before everyone on this site jumps on me, realize it's just an idea. Any thoughts on going that route or using that as a defense for your coverage decisions when the crazies call?