Friday night high school football coverage

148 pages? What's the editorial/ad ratio?

 

Evil, I just read your Beat Arthur shit at the bottom of your post. Where is that from? Hilarious.

 

Thanks.
That's an original composition.

 

Last year it was 60-40. It will run anywhere from 65-35 to 55-45.
We typically do a overall preview and a sidebar per team.
Core teams get two to three feats. Our two largest schools get about six features.
Our two main colleges (WVU and Marshall) get three 20 to 30 inch stories.

 

We cover 22 prep teams with 5 full time and 5-6 corros. For the schools in the far reaches of the coverage area, we bring in a couple of college kids and they work the crap out of the phones for 2 hours each Friday night during football season and on Tuesdays and Fridays during BKB season. We've been able to set up a pretty good system where we get cell numbers for head coaches and all assistant coaches and we call them, not the other way around. Coaches seem to forget phone numbers after they lose. We also contract with a couple of corros to compile weekly stats for both FB and BKB, so even tho we only get capsule info on the outlying games, we do get their stats and it helps generate takeout ideas throughout the season. Plus using corros to gather stats frees the staffers up to blog, do notes and focus on takeouts.

Last year we also scrapped the conventional 15 to 18-inch nuts and bolts gamers and scaled back to a 10-inch feature/gamer with a beefed up breakout box that contained enough of the nuts and bolts info to keep the hard-core stats freaks happy. The result was much better story content and we won more spot sports story awards than we've ever won. Plus shorter, tighter stories opened up the news hole for us to pump up the art, which the photographers and designers love. And we seemed to hit deadlines much better since the info boxes could be done throughout the game and they were pretty much done when the game ended and didn't have to be weaved into the story.

 

We got staff management problems, and it is impossible to cover games on Friday night for our paper. 20 high schools, we maybe pick one game to get to.

First reason is deadline, the other is space. We just don't have it for more than one gamer.

We rely on call-ins. Now, this is where it gets tricky. WE GET EVER GAME, hook or crook. Whether it is shared from another paper, called a coaches wife at 11:15 p.m. or we get a guy with 35 years on the desk who works magic. I have watched, ON DEADLINE, this guy look at a roster, find an unusual name, and call that number from the phone book looking for a result. Every single time we get correct and accurate info, though we do skip a line score.

The best instance however was this guy cranky about not getting the score, and calling the grandmother of a player on the opposing OUT OF CIRC team. Naturally, the grandmother was at the game and her grandson scored a couple of TDs or something like that. Amazing. I just watch.

 

How about 18 schools with two writers and a desk guy from a universal desk who doesn't edit, three main area schools (one is covered by a correspondent) and no one to take calls because the company won't pay for part-time people that we were using before as contract labor (in other words, the money is going out of either one pocket or the other anyway).

Right now I'm stuck with getting the desk guy to pick up the phone, get the score and a couple of highlights within a three-minute call, no stats. Thing is I'm afraid because he's relatively slow on the desk he'll give up doing the calls.

I don't think we should drop down to one writer for three major teams...ie, bringing someone in to do about two hours of intense work because the desk can't.

Other than to get my resume out, what would you do?

 

I started at a weekly a few months ago and we're planning football coverage.
We have a three-man staff - no SE either - two stringers and hopefully an intern come fall.

My plan is this - No gamers in the papers. Of our six schools, one paper comes out Wednesday, three on Thursday and two more on Friday.
I'm telling the guys I work with that running a gamer nearly a week after the fact makes zero sense. I want to put gamers online for the next day, with features for our Wednesday paper and upcoming game previews for the rest of them with front-page teasers about the game coverage online.

To me, it makes perfect sense. Or am I insane?

 

Here's my deal:

This year, after false-starts the previous two years, we'll finally be getting a football preview tab. Not sure how many pages it'll end up being, but I intend to overshoot and have extra stories in case I get bleeped on space. Five high schools, one D-III college. My plan is a feature and a team preview, via rhetorical Q&A format, for all six. Then a region HS preview and mayhaps a feature on a local kid playing at a larger college. I'm working off the impression I'll get 24 pages, figuring I won't get more than that, and if I get less, it can spill over into the regular section in that or coming weeks.

Assuming I don't go the theme route, remembering how that got skewered when it came up before, any suggestions on a cover photo? And are there any trend story ideas out there? I'd like at least one non-preview/feature in the mix. I did something with the emergence of next-generation artificial turf last year, but it was a spur-of-the-moment story brought on by a rainy Friday that washed out every game in the state except one that was on FieldTurf, so I went. Like most things I do, it sucked. But it's the thought that counts, right?

 

I'm kind of in Rhody's situation, but I'm a one-man staff covering four schools this year, taking my own photos. The paper comes out on Thursday, so I'm wondering any thoughts on game coverage concepts out there?