Dear dimwit on the phone

At least they contacted you.

The local Boys & Girls Club director let us know about the 18-year-old Senior Babe Ruth state tournament he's hosting this week. But he forgot to tell us about the 16-year-old tournament being played in town as well.

 

Let's not play phone tag to report a hole-in-one...just leave the basic information on my machine if I'm not in and I'll call you if I need anything else. Yes, I've asked you three times now to leave the info, and I won't be saying it a fourth time.

 

Stop complaining when your youth baseball league gets no coverage when repeated attempts at getting all-star rosters, results, brackets, schedules (anything at all) repeatedly go unanswered.

If you can't tell us when you're playing and who you're playing, forget it, we'll cover the leagues that do supply us with the basic information.

 

You know, since we always bash people in this thread, I'd like to throw a curveball...

Dear every Little League parent we've interacted with this month,

Thanks for all the great feedback on our photos and stories. Nice to know someone, somewhere cares.

-SchiezaInc

 

If you're not affiliated with Little League International, then you're just playing youth baseball/softball. Babe Ruth, American Legion, and your random tournament for the kids who weren't good enough to make the "all-star" team are <i>not Little League.</i>

Also, if your tournament winner can't wind up at Williamsport or wherever they're sending the girls this year Portland, Ore., you'll have to submit your results online and wait your turn.

If schedules are supplied in a timely manner, we might be able to find somebody from our decimated staff to cover the final. Otherwise, you can send us a dorky (but high-res!) photo of your team holding a banner and we'll try to make it fit on the one day each week we publish the compiled e-mail.

 

This. I'm at a shop [/douche!] less than half the size of my old one, but I'm pretty sure I've received more feedback from covering Cal Ripken BB/Babe Ruth SB All-Star postseason tournaments than anything else I've done. And it's all been positive...even the people who aren't getting covered are like, 'How can we get covered?' Then I tell them (mostly give us contact info and call in your games) and they seem receptive.

 

We don't have Little League (everything here is through Babe Ruth), but we had a parent come in and buy like 60 single copies for scrapbooking purposes. Should I still make people submit and wait their turn?

 

We have a Facebook page that we've been running for about a year now and it was a struggle, an absolutely struggle, to get it to 100 people, which we did on June 22nd. Since we started covering Little League and posting pictures/updates, we've gotten 40 more people and they're almost all there now b/c of our Little League coverage.

Makes it almost feel worth it.

 

That's nice. And how do you make money from that?

 

We advertise what we've got in this week's papers on our Facebook page. The parents go out and buy the paper.

 

You use it as a tool and a way to have conversations that increases the quality of your product. I post links to my blogs and stories on it, and it gives you a chance to say something like, "Podunk was eliminated from the playoffs last night. What did you think of their season?" It's a nice way to informally chat with your readers and let them know it's a two-way street. I cover mostly high school sports and have about 350 friends, many of whom are those high school kids - all of whom added me because I still think tracking them down is a bit on the creep side. But through that I've been able to reach a few of them for quick interviews when going through coaches in the summer or offseason to get a number may not have been easy, and I've already seen a couple kids announce their college commitments there and been able to break the news. I spend about five minutes on it twice a day and it's been worth every second.

 

Yes, I've found it helpful on occasion to be able to track down a kid, who has first friended us via our Facebook page.

In fact, just this week, I had a track kid in Europe competing at the Worlds...limited phone minutes, so we did the interview via Facebook and it worked well.