no box scores

I sure hope you know what's going to be a better usage of that saved space.

And I sure hope you aren't saying it's high school girls' soccer.

 

If you run 5-6 wire stories per day at 12 inches a pop, lop off 2-3 inches per story and you have 24 inches right there.

How many people read the last few inches of a wire story?

The round ups are 60-72 inches, right? There is your wasted space right there.

 

Why not prep girls' soccer? How many decent-length prep gamers can you fit on one page, with good-sized art? Four, maybe five? That's coverage involving up to 10 teams in your area. Number of players on each team x average number of parents/close family members/friends per player = not a small number of local residents who would be interested in coverage of those games. You don't think that page has a better chance of being of interest to your readership than a page full of non-local MLB or NFL or NBA agate, only one or two of which involve teams in the area, and at least half of which involve teams that aren't in playoff contention? Hey, I'm the first to say that prep girls' soccer isn't as glamorous as Yankees-Red Sox, but they can get Yankees-Red Sox elsewhere, and quicker than you can provide it to them in 6-hour-late print. They can't get girls' soccer anywhere else. If they were interested in Yankees-Red Sox (or any other non-local pro team), chances are what you can provide them on that front is minuscule compared to what they can get online. They aren't coming to your paper because you have a box and a two-line recap acknowledging that the game happened.

Even if we aren't talking about using that space for local preps, you can fill it with more coverage of your local pro/college teams that you didn't have space for before. Or national analysis and columns pieces, or run a better NBA playoff roundup than you would be able to if you weren't trying to fit 3 playoff game stories in two columns while running a full page of MLB agate. We've all come across great wire features at some point where we thought, "If only we had the space to run this ...."

 

If you're a 15K daily, there's some substance to the argument.

You get much larger, and national copy/agate is going to be read a larger cross-section of your readership than 95% of local copy/agate.

That's the argument for not getting rid of what you already have nationally.

Your greatest selling point is in being a one-stop shop. You give them a reason to go to the Web ... or USA TODAY ... and some of them will just do that and skip over the hometown paper.

 

I definitely understand that the bigger the market you're in, the more national the interest of a cross section of your audience will be. My argument is that, in any market, there's a degree of fragmented readership interest. What you need to do to sell a paper to everyone in a group with fragmented interests is to cover the crap out of something that all/many of them share an interest in, and in most cases, that's the local teams, be it pro, college or preps. A random sample of residents from, say, Houston, may all have different favorite pro teams, but being in Houston, it's a pretty safe bet that they're all have a relatively high degree of interest in the Rockets. So what you need to do is to become THE SOURCE for all things Rockets. In an ideal world, you would have space to do that AND to run all the national agate. But not being in an ideal world, you have to choose. The problem with national agate is that you can't commit to running just a couple boxes; if you go, you go all in, and that takes up so much space on a daily basis that it hampers how much you can do with your local teams (who would you kill for an extra page -- say, maybe that page with all the non-local agate on it -- come prep playoff time and you have 15 teams playing). At the same time that kind of quick-glance national coverage doesn't provide anywhere near enough on each team to really satisfy the interest of the readers who are fans of a particular non-local team, and they can easily get much more in-depth coverage of those teams from elsewhere. That's why I don't think newspapers should try to be one-stop shops. Trying to be a one-stop shop in the current media landscape is to put yourself in a competition with the entire sum of the Internet, and no single organization or publication has the resources to win that battle. Except for big-time papers who target a more national audience, most papers need to find a niche and excel in it as much as they can.

 

They'll be phoners. One graf per goal. About 15 grafs, tops.

 

It's only 4-5 games on the page. And some of those could be covered by expenses saved from not needing an agate clerk since you don't have an agate page. Yes, I know, chances are the expenses saved will just go into the company's pockets and not back into the product. That's the problem with this particular case -- they weren't cutting baseball agate so they could better utilize the space; they just cut it to cut pages, leaving readers with less of a product.

 

This was in Saturday's East Valley Tribune from Sports Editor Bob Romantic:


Baseball box scores are back in the Trib
To everyone who offered their opinion on the elimination of baseball box scores from the sports section, I thank you.
Your voices were heard and some modifications were made that allowed us to bring the box scores back in today's paper. That doesn't happen without your inpout.
The slumping economy is forcing businesses to make tough decisions, but as many of you pointed out box scores are staple of the sports section.
So, for those of you who hung with us during this past week, thank you for your patience. To those who have already canceled their subscriptions, our apologoies. Hopefully, we will earn your business again.


They have cut back the Diamondbacks coverage to fit the boxes on the page.

 

I'm shocked that more readers, in a major-league market, wanted MLB box scores than more girls soccer coverage, or boys tennis coverage, or more coverage of the other local prep sports that absolutely no one generally cares one iota about except a handful of parents.

Shocked.

 

Well, you're overstating your objections a bit, to the extent of someone who doesn't live in an area where prep sports matter.

In a major league market, OK. But don't think it's like that everywhere.

 

And in some major-league markets (Chicago, for example), prep sports is pretty big.

 

I would want to know if Sally down the street scored a goal, but I also want to know if the D-Backs won last night and who got the hits.

You gotta do the box. [/thatswhatshesaid]