In your city/state, does sports drive readership?

jake, such as murder, death, rape, government scandal, the day after an election, plane wrecks or maybe something like 9-11? there's a reason why folks put so much thought into what goes above the fold on the A for a reason.

even being a sports guy, i can admit i cared a helluva lot more about 9-11 coverage than i did after the seahawks won the super bowl.

 

Most people say sports drives circulation, and base it on anecdotal evidence.
Nearly all marketing surveys - and I've seen more than a few - disagree.
Local news drives circulation. Many surveys and focus groups will show that a lot of people don't care about sports and rarely read it - the obvious largest group being women.
Recent surveys I saw showed that more and more sports fans are turning to websites to get their sporting news.
Which websites? Mostly league and team-sponsored sites - NFL.com, MLB.com, Dallascowboys.com (or whatever it is).
The reader gets the stats and such they want, and also get the rose-colored view of their team that "fans" want.
How many of us have received letters / calls from readers upset that the lead columnist is critical of the team, player, whatever, that end with the plea "If you (the paper) got behind the team, maybe they would do better.
Most sports readers are fans who don't want criticism, only cheerleading.
Don't think it's true? Look at the cuts in Dallas and other organizations that are killing the expenditure-heavy department - Sports.
It is no longer considered good business to spend that much money to cover a team or league when they can get it off the wires, for which they are already paying.
The golden age of sports reporting - and I would suggest that was mid-1980s to the late 1990s when sports sections increased, when enterprise reporting became the norm - is over.

 

I got angry the first time a sports cohort told me that sports doesn't drive circulation - he was a higher-up in the department trying to explain his lack of leverage. Of course, I thought he was kissing up to management and said so.

But he was really patient about it and was like, "I've seen survey after survey. Market after market. I don't want it to be true any more than you do, believe me. But we just don't sell papers. We don't. Local news does."

One modern caveat - sports drives Internet readership a great deal, especially in college towns where spread-out alums want to check in on things. But, hell, they can go to Rivals.com and talk with each other or

Another thing that kills us is that on Internet blogs and fan forums, if there's something relevant about the team that's run anywhere, people will find it and either link it, which is good, or brief everyone on the highlights, which is bad. They've all become one-stop shopping centers for team news. That's why we should fight diligently to make sure these sites aren't just cutting and pasting stories. They do that sometimes because they don't want to "reward the MSM" with hits. They know hits are vital to our survival.

It's a bleak time to try to argue for more sports manpower and resources. It just is. Surveys show that it's just flushing money down the toilet.

 

I think in some areas of the country, sports has a bigger pull on readership than others. Here in Oklahoma, for instance, OU football has a big impact. Same with OSU basketball, or football when they're good. I'd love to see the circulation numbers for us last year when Tulsa went to a bowl game and won their conference. Football, high school and college, definitely has an affect in Texas. I always think the time of year that surveys are taken has an affect on things, as does the scope of the survey (national, regional, single market).

I also wonder, when those surveys show reader interest being higher in Lifestyles-type stuff, how much of that comes from the comics and a couple of other features (Dear Abby), and how much comes from the actual staff-produced copy? I know women read that stuff a lot more, and music and movie stuff draws varied interest, but is that really equal to or greater than sports, or does that stuff get a lot of casual readers who go to the section for the comics first.

Also, while it's true that many readers are going to other sources for information, they aren't going there to replace newspapers for the most part. They're going there to supplement papers. There is still a lot of news that you won't get on a team site, and Rivals, while its people are getting better, still doesn't hold the level of reliability most papers have. So, when readers want to know if the Cowboys really are going to sign Terrell Owens, they go to the Dallas Morning News, not dallascowboys.com. When they want to know if the Nats are still going to deal Soriano, they go to the Washington Post, not the Nats' site. It's the nature of the beast that league- and team-sponsored sites won't have the same level of coverage of that stuff, or the bad stuff, as the local paper will, if they have any coverage like that at all.

 

I can buy that local is what will drive numbers ... buthow much of that "local" is the high school football games on Friday night? High school football is king here, even above many D-I schools, and in many surveys, etc., I've seen, local sports tends to be lumped into plain local coverage - which I tend to think is because higher-ups want that preps interest to boost the news side.

 

Even in a non-football is king market like mine, rack sales can spike a bit on Saturdays. But the future is newspaper sites that can kick ass online with stories, stats, rosters, databases that Howe would be proud of. Some have them already, some are behind, but all of us are headed that way -- or should be. The hits you get are phenomenal.

 

Yeah, we'd been discussing that over here. We've got an ever-growing site dedicated to football scores, stats, etc., and it gets crazy busy...but what we were throwing around what what would happen if we made that a premium site. Maybe $10ish a year or something. It'd never fly here - but it would sure tell you how dedicated folks are to getting their stuff and getting it online.

 

OH SHIT!!! We had that wrong. We had the Steelers winning that game.

 

Here is what drives circulation: excellent coverage of big stories and consistent coverage of little stories, regardless of section. Regardless of what the big story is (sports team doing well, big murder trial, elections, zoning fight over Wal-Mart, etc.) casual readers will pick up a copy for it. And your regular readers want to be able to rely on your consistent coverage of the little stories (the regular-season games that led to the local sports title, being on top of local crime, etc.) The problem with cutting too much from any aspect of the paper (sports, local news, photogs, etc.) is that you don't do a good job covering the stories leading up to the big story, meaning you don't do a good job covering the big story because you can't give the story proper context -- whether that context comes from past coverage or the sources to add context. Too many publishers and editors figure "When the big story comes, we'll still throw plenty of bodies at it, despite the cuts." What they don't realize is that without the run-up of doing a good job with little stories, more bodies just multiplies your mediocrity because those bodies don't have the context to cover the story.

 

A direct quote from our ME:

"Sports doesn't sell newspapers."

Clueless.

 

come on fish, you know who really won that game ... and btw, damn, thanks for catching that. i was wondering how much longer that would hang out there.

 

The only thing I know is we have had an average 2,000 spike in our circulation around August every year over the last 10 years (our publisher himself has said this, which means he's not dicking us out of anything — well, at least not on this point.). This spike levels off starting in mid-November and reduces until the following August.

But then again, around these parts, high school football coverage is 7 days a week, not just Friday nights.