What's your Olympic coverage plan?

I believe we're going to have a template-style page of Olympics content every day. Given that we have exactly one local competitor (two, if you want to stretch) and he's not exactly in a glamour event, I don't know how we'll fill the space.

I asked the federation PR guy to have him call after his competition, and I suspect that'll happen since he's already arranged two phone interviews from China. Beyond that, it'll likely be all wire.

I think that's what we did four years ago as well.

I'll be watching a lot of tape-delayed NBC, plus a steady dose of whatever live Webcasts I can find. But I'm a rare Olympics nut.

 

We have no space issues and can do this however we want -- and I can tell you that our decision is that football, both college and pro, will be much bigger at this place than the Olympics will be.

The Games are huge for NBC and their associated websites. They're still important to us, but they won't be taking over the site, that's for sure. Too many other things our readers/users are more universally interested in.

 

Well, since I have an intimate knowledge of the kayaking competition and venue from the Atlanta games, I'm always interested in that, too.

 

Up here there's not nearly the same interest in football, so we'll give the Olympics pretty good play. Probably a page, maybe two a day. However, we've got two pretty massive sporting events in our city during the Olympics which will take precedence. Might just be a page, with pretty much the same sort of content Huntsie describes.

 

Perhaps. But that's the way we'll play it. And besides, the tailback has a chance to be one of the more intriguing stories at Microville Tech this fall.

 

I doubt that, but your point about stories is a good one.
Any Olympic Games is full of them, be they from Microville or some other part of the world that the residents of Microville spend their lives trying not to pay attention to
They make for interesting reading, but shit, why give that to your readers when you can document every drop of sweat off tailback's nose
I bet he even passed basketweaving last semester

 

We're lucky in that, as a PM with a 9:15 last page deadline, we'll be able to beat our local NBC affiliate to many of the results. HS football in our area is down to six teams, so, when we're not putting together fall sports previews (you've not lived until you've written a Class D girls' volleyball season preview), we ought to have some space for stuff, provided the publisher's current war on wire copy doesn't escalate any further.

 

Plan?

 

What s/he said.

 

Will it make anyone's head explode if I tell you we've got five people heading to China right now and four pages a day reserved for the Olympics?

 

Four-page sections, so maybe half of a page.