It's Monday morning and I need a support group

At my former paper where I was a one-man staff, we didn't have any AP photos and I was required to have at least one photo for the paper every day. Didn't matter what photo, just as long as there was one.

Those reader submission photos were a huge help. I could hold onto a few for a couple of weeks, and run them if the weather was bad, or if I was busy and had other things to do than shoot/cover a game.

 

I have it even worse right now. Under our new templates, our corporate overlords decided that a big photo rail on the side of my page would be a great idea. The idea is for submitted photos to go there. Now, there are four slots there for "submitted items" that I have to try and fill each day. Which is just fucking ludicrous. I barely get 5 submissions a week, much less four a day. Usually don't have enough of those reader photos so I fill it with shots from a game I covered or (if absolutely necessary) AP.

But even without that photo rail, submitted shots of youth sports teams are a community sports editor's best friend.

 

You do it because it makes people happy, and 20 happy people to me is a lot more valuable than 200 people who would never know the difference if they read an extra World Cup article or not. Maybe only 20 out of 1,000 parents care about that baseball team photo, but when their kid's swim team wins a meet, they'll care that the policy still exists.

I write a lot of crap that the majority of my paper's readers don't care about. So do you, from regular season high school soccer games to season previews of the tiny wrestling team. Obviously stuff like Little League baseball team photos doesn't have any place in a big metro daily, but if you have this shitty of an attitude about running it in a smaller paper's sports section, you need to get over it.

 

This.

When we went to AP Limited earlier this spring, I was confident we'd hear from readers who missed box scores, NASCAR recaps, and, yes, even the transactions. So far, two calls from the same NASCAR fan who doesn't get we don't have the glance and standings (yes, reader called twice ... like I said, caller's a NASCAR fan). But I'll average a couple of calls a week about team photos and how to submit local sports announcements, even to the point where I put it on my voicemail. Nowadays, more than ever, it's all about knowing the audience.

 

This is somewhat true, somewhat bullshit. Take the NASCAR wire out in favor of Johnny's little league team because in one parent's mind: "We love them." See what hell you catch...the truth is that with more and more stuff reduced that people are used to seeing, so increases our irrelevancy. I hear this from avid internet users: "I still like to see all the standings and the roundup of your major league capsules on one page rather than click a mouse 32 times."

 

What increases our irrelevancy is ceasing to be the place people in the community can turn to to get their news out to and to find out other news from the community.

I definitely think a layout of baseball box scores as NASCAR agate is nice and important to get in, but a third article in three days about Tiger's neck pain probably can be held in favor of a little league baseball photo.

You wan to hear people complain? Get rid of that painfully cheesy column written by the old lady at the nursing home that is basically just a collection of where people went on summer vacation, who visited for Christmas and who's in the hospital. That's a big collection of "who gives a shit" stuff too, just like photos of a Little League team, but I probably don't want to know how many more times that gets read than my football gamer.

 

You're spot on.

I always figure, if Bubba Joe wants his NASCAR agate, or Dickweed McGee insists on his baseball boxscore, they always have the option of getting that sort of stuff elsewhere. The Metro Daily Times will have that stuff, as will various different places on this thing called the INTERNET. That stuff should, in theory, always be secondary to getting whatever local content you can put in the paper. If you can get it in, great. But if not, tough. Bubba and Dickweed can find whatever they need in millions of different places, but Overenthusiastic Soccer Mom won't be able to find her son's T-Ball team anywhere else.

 

There is a difference in being a source of information and being a scrapbook.

 

I think there's a balance here that can be achieved. We run a page once per week, partly for the very reason that we're not cluttering up the section with this stuff on days when we have far more important things to run.

Readers love it. we get more and more stuff sent in each week. They know where to look for it and aren't expecting me to bump important stuff for it. In short: it has it's place. Like everything else does.

For the record, we're certainly not the New York Times. But we're not the weekly Podunk Item, either.

 

Youth sports - the bane of my existence.

 

The old lady at the nursing home, the guy who writes about taking care of flowers or your garden, the old fart compiling the fishing/hunting report and youth sports photos are more popular than today's management types want to believe.

 

So dies the newspaper business.