the growth of local-local

Well said.
Well if you farm out the work to people in general the obvious problems are quality control and consistency.
I do think readers are willing to pay for the quality control and consistency newspapers provide — and they expect that from our product. When we can't deliver it, well, circulation suffers.

 

One other thing. The point of my post that you replied to wasn't to suggest newspapers just keep doing thing the old way. I was suggesting we ask coaches to meet us halfway, as opposed to trusting them to do it themselves.

It's a given that a roster is being made. Well, do the roster on a printable email format. Same with the schedule. Then, if you find a way to translate that somewhat painlessly to your newspaper applications (usually easy enough if you use spreadsheets) then you've found a workable compromise.

You can provide the readers the same service with the newspaper doing less work than it traditionally does typing everything in and at the same time you aren't asking the coach/parents/administrators to do ALL the work.

And you provide quality control which, in these situations, is a huge thing.

 

I mentioned on another recent thread that if I had a spare $1 million, I'd commission a web development team to build an app that would allow coaches and ADs to type their schedules, rosters and game results into one online form and have that info automatically uploaded into all the online services such as highschoolsports.net, MaxPreps, etc.

As it stands now, schools desiring to have their current info appear on multiple sites have to keyboard it from scratch at each site. That's inefficient, particularly if a league designates MaxPreps as their "official" site but the local paper is affiliated with one of the other sites.

 

I haven't scoured every newspaper in the country, but one site that impresses me for high school sports is the Reading (Pa.) Eagle: http://www.readingeagle.com/bgd.aspx

What other newspapers have high school sports sites that impress folks?

I'm especially interested in sites that aren't JUST football and hoops. Sites that also recognize the importance (and local readership potential) of everything from field hockey to cross country to soccer to volleyball.

 

We've kicked this around a couple of times, most recently at:



http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/1760204/

 

Not sure if it's in the sj link suggested above (I haven't looked all through it), but the Arizona Daily Star has a good Web site, with many blogs, slides and links to other useful sites, including azhighschoolsports.com.

During the school year, there are multiple stories every day, and readily available links to earlier stories by each writer who has anything posted that day.

Information, some just useful, some potentially popular for web/interactive purposes, is presented in several formats and platforms, there is a searchable data base for schools, and a PDF map of schools in the coverage area can be printed out.

Everything looks pretty nice when you open it, too -- check out the all-region teams packages, which are very sharp -- for an example.

Pretty impressive, and I'm thinking that, other than writers, they must have some separate web people who specialize in that area, and thus, don't also necessarily spend a lot of time on the print edition.

I don't actually know if that's the case, though.

Here's a link to it:

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/preps/

It's a little light on material right now, just because of the time of year, I'm sure. But have a look and see what you think. I'm sure you'll get an idea of what I'm saying.

 

That's a problem that can be avoided so long as they are still typing in rosters and schedules for their own purposes on something other than these third-party sites. For example. If the roster is on a word document or something similar, they can cut and paste off the word document to just a regular email. A series of search and replaces, taking 5 minutes tops, can change multi spaces to tabs, change style things to conform with what your site/paper uses, etc.

And, if you contract with one of these third-party sites, you can steer the business in your direction by being the site that does that work for the coaches/administrators. Instead of them having to type a roster for the purposes of programs/etc., another for Max preps, etc., they just have to do it once.

 

Within 20 years, we'll see little league sites like this.