Friday night high school football coverage

Hit the web. Run some kind of feature and preview capsules for the four teams on Thursday with a big tease guiding people to the papers website for a game of the week report. If you can crank it out quickly enough, you might be able to have something online by the time the teams get back from the postgame get-together.

You could also try calling the other coaches to get highlights from their games, in our area they usually have a kid tracking stats on the sideline. That way you can have a main gamer and result capsules from the other teams. If you're up to it, you could also run a Saturday evening/Sunday morning news and notes follow-up online as well.

 

I don't know about this line of thinking. In my shop, we cover five teams, one is the local team and the other four are little country schools who are covered by correspondents. Those four barely get three grafs per story in the big daily, but we can give them a full gamer and photos so they can read about little Jimmy Bob Touchdown's great night. Plus, we have a lot of elderly readers who don't have internet or a subscription to the daily paper, so it's still news to them by the time they get the gamer.

I understand scaling back gamers in a weekly, but I'm not sure you need to eliminate them entirely.

 

Rhody is absolutely taking the right approach. It's stupid to have Friday night football gamers in a Sunday paper, much less one coming out mid-week. Feature everything, run area stats leaders and do a great job of previewing. They can still read about Johnny Bumfuck's great night and actually learn something about the kid in the process.

 

One for the Rhody has it figured out, but take it one step further and make sure you have a real good reference to the web content. Use the paper as a way to promote the poo out of the web site, blogs and multimedia features. The more prep readership you can point towards the web site, the more resources you can get from the money folks.

 

Well lets pretend then the paper doesn't have a Web site. Does that change anything?

 

I'm still against the gamer. You can run a feature previewing the upcoming game, another story, and somewhere on the inside, run a small story on the game with a full boxscore

 

Hitting the web is good. But for in-paper, I'd downplay the actual game stories, it's a week old. Maybe 12-15 inches. Or do a roundup.

Do a player feature and previews of that week's games. With four teams, you can do couple players from each team or three. Get plenty of file photos for previews.

 

I was going to call bs on Evil there with his 148 pages, until he inferred that it was college and high schools in one preview. Here at my shop, we do a 56-page prep tab for the 40ish schools, and a 48-page tab for the SEC school/area colleges/SEC.

Ad ratio is maybe 75-25. I know, I know ... idiots that can't sell crap.

We do a gameday preview for the major SEC school/SEC/etc. each Saturday, leaving an eight-pager for preps, etc. We split THAT up into a cover, page 2 (boxes, roundups, jumps), page 7 (roundups, jumps) and page 8 (roundups, jumps) all for preps. And on Page 3 we do a regular cover, so that the occasional U. of Podunk volleyball match gets a centerpiece treatment. Regular agate page on Page 4, with jumps/etc. on Pages 5 and 6.

A nifty setup, actually, that predates me.

rb