Dear dimwit on the phone

I honestly don't think hyperlocal coverage has that much of a link to it. Many parents are pushy becuase they think their child is god's gift to everyone. Youth sports just accentuates that with its competitive environment.

 

or they don't work at a teeny, tiny paper with nothing else better to do.

 

hell, to be downright honest: i recently moved and got out of the biz.
hell, i could give two shits how the local prep teams do until the state championships. i mean i could give twofuckingshits.
i haven't checked a local score in any sport and i haven't been to a game ... and i don't plan on doing either in the near future.

 

Interesting tug of war on preps and parents. It's the parents who demand that Johnnie and Janie get a crapton of coverage for dribbling a basketball (usually poorly) or knocking over a hurdle or puking at the end of a 5k XC race. Yet, our paper discontinued its academic top 10 tab (covering about 25 schools) because advertisers couldn't get any money out of these parents.

A tab like that would be perfect for businesses that rent tents or serve pasta by the tub or shoot graduation photos, etc. We now run the top 10s in paper, as space allows, so it takes about two months to run them all. We kept it going as a community service. It's much more of a community service that covering prep sports, which I did for nearly 30 years.

 

We would typically include sub-varsity results on our weekly Community Sports page. The coaches never could be bothered to get them to us the same day anyway. And we wouldn't end up guessing will they call or will they not?

So we set a Monday 6 p.m. deadline and would run the page Wednesdays with all the other youth club and adult participatory sports. "The Podunk High sophomore girls split a pair of games last week, beating Shitsville and losing to Blowhard....." Everyone seemed satisfied.

 

Seems as if there is always something better to do than cover JV. If you have to rely on JV gamers to fill a paper, it's time to rethink coverage strategies. The reason papers cover JV is because it's a easy story.

 

Yup, did that at my first paper as well. Worked very well. Bowling, darts, JV, youth hoops...whatever, if it got sent, it got in (in some form). The only thing we "blew out" was junior hockey. But even that only got a once-a-week hole in Monday's paper.

+1
You can be good at your job by finding good stories out of those youth games...not just getting the final score and how they scored into a story form.

 

That's a great point. As an average reader, I might not give a crap who won or what the score was, but I will take time to read a well-written feature that tells a great human interest story.

 

I transfered to news years ago to avoid the inevitieble "we need to cover Little League games because parents will buy papers" bullshit. Best decision I ever made. I couldn't take myself seriously, being in my 30s and trying to interview 6 year olds about tee ball. I wanted more out of my career.

And to stay on topic of idiot callers, my volume of callers' stupid questions decreased drastically once I got out of sports. Why do the laziest and dumbest among the population have the sports department on speed dial?

 

So our front desk lady just happens to have a daughter who cheers for one of the middle schools in town. They "won" "nationals" Saturday in Indy. She had already told us they were going to "nationals" when she came upstairs one day -- not long after she started working at our paper -- and asked if we'd do a story on the team because "it would mean so much to the girls."

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon. She stops by the office -- of course she did -- and asked us if we'd do a story for today's paper and put it on the front page. Never mind that our section was going to be filled to the brim with a lot of other stuff -- track recap, district baseball, Masters and Keeneland, to name a few -- already, and the results weren't even available.

We tell her it won't be a front page story in today's paper and she says something to the effect of "but it's nationals! And 18 of the 20 girls were cheering for the first time!"

And she went on and on. An hour or so later, she calls the newsroom and gives me the website where I can find the results, and asks if we can get a story together for today's section -- but nothing is posted. How are we supposed to write a story without results?

I don't know how long she'll be our receptionist, but I don't want to think how bad she's gonna be when her daughter reaches high school ...

 

The logical question should have been, "How did the 18 girls qualify for nationals when it's the first time they were cheering?"

 

We have had people that literally have a 1x3 or so sized ad running once a week at a contract rate try and pull that BS. 1) Advertising never matters when I make my editorial positions in the first place. 2) If it theoretically did, this other player's dad is one of our largest advertisers...lol