What's your Olympic coverage plan?

If you're a 35K daily, yes.

 

Somebody asked, I answered. We have about 20 columns of news hole on an average day, and a Division I FB team in town. Most of our readers care about football, not about a rhythmic gymnast from India, no matter how interesting a story she is.

We'll obviously do more on the 5-6 local athletes who are competing there. But otherwise, it's probably roundup city, especially since everything that happens there will be 17 or 18 hours old by the time it's in our paper.

And as anyone who lives here can tell you, Microville residents pay a lot of attention to the rest of the world - especially Asia - since about 10 percent of them aren't native Americans.

 

I don't think it's xenophobic at all to think that your readers will care about football over the Olympics. I understand the importance of the Olympics. I get that it's once every four years, yada, yada, yada. But sports fans don't drop everything else they care about to focus on the Olympics for two weeks. Maybe it used to be that way, but I just don't see your average college football fan saying, 'well, I don't want practice reports, the taekwando finals are going on.'

If you're in a football mad area (like we are), you don't sacrifice a centerpiece on one of the college teams to run (really old) centerpieces of Olympic sports happening half a world away. I just don't think you're serving your readers that way. There are certain stories (Phelps, women's gymnastics, men's hoops) that absolutely should be played up, because interest dictates it. Find an interesting feature to anchor an inside Olympic page. But running centerpieces "just because it's the Olympics" isn't the way to go any more. My two cents, FWIW.

 

Agreed.

It's all about serving the readers. And in a lot of places, Olympics in August falls behind college two-a-days and NFL training camps on the food chain.

 

Would that be the "plausibly live" Olympics? Wake me when it's over. Yes, the agate page would take care of it. Aug. 11, first day for h.s. practices. Yee-Haw.

 

Don't give me "serving the readers" when you spoonfeed them daily stories on two-a-days; quotes about optimism and "human interest stories" about a coddled DB who once went to charity dinner and therefore is on par with the Pope
I've been to a number of APSE judging conventions and had to read endless stories of this dreck - so little of it is interesting.

I think it's appalling that "professional" journalists can so summarily dismiss an event like the Olympics in favour of column, main, sidebars and notes on fucking practice
Allen Iverson had it right

 

EE94, thank you! Finally someone on this thread with some perspective.

 

Well now, that narrows down the paper list quite dramatically.

 

EE ... I don't think anyone is dismissing the Olympics at all. But face it, the Olympics aren't nearly the big deal they used to be ... even some of the athletes have come out against how overwhelmingly corporate they've become. There are important stories there, for sure. But if I have to choose between centerpiecing a local football feature versus a 12-hour old wire story on the Olympics, I'm probably choosing football.

Then again, I work at a mid-size daily, not a major metro. Obviously, a paper like the Washington Post or the New York Times is going to have a different opinion of this, and they should. They serve a different set of readers than we do.

 

EE,

Are you on the Canadian Olympic Committee or something? Your passion for the Olympics is noteworthy. But far from everyone shares it.

We'll run a decent-sized Olympic roundup every day. But we're a small daily that emphasizes local first, and it's not going to supplant our bread-and-butter for the daily, or for the website, because our football coverage (even of "practice, what we like to call fall camp) generates 5-6 times the web traffic as anything else in the paper.

When I see people on the street, at the county fair, at my athletic club or in the bars, they want to know about Microville Tech's football team, not the Pakistani field hockey or table tennis teams. We'll try to answer their questions.

Bottom line, far, far more of our readers care about the local BCS football team (and the BCS team about 45 miles away) than give a rat's ass about Olympic judo, sailing, rhythmic gymnastics, team handball, rifle, fencing, equestrian or basically any Olympic sport other than track, men's basketball and gymnastics.

So we'll continue to treat our local BCS FB team (as well as other local stuff that generates interest, like summer-league wood bat baseball, our Division I soccer and volleyball teams that are starting fall camp, high school sports, etc.) as the top reason Microville residents buy our paper or go to our website and read our blogs, rather than spoonfeed them overblown "up close and personal" stories from China that nobody cares about and that is at least 15 hours behind the news cycle.

Does that attitude make me a "professional" journalist? Don't know, don't care.

And as far as being xenophobic, I just don't pay much attention to OLympians of all nations, not just the ones from the United States.

 

if economics is your motivation when it comes to coverage - people will buy our paper if we do this - then don't complain when your paper's business office makes its decisions based on economics - we will save money if we DON'T do this

 

I honestly don't see what your problem is with some of these responses. Nobody (that I can tell) is saying, "Fuck the Olympics. Let's not have any Olympic news." They are just saying that some days this summer it's not going to be as important to certain readerships as other news stories. That is absolutely correct, and your paper's coverage should reflect as much. If your paper doesn't reflect that, your paper has failed.

So maybe you don't centerpiece the Olympics EVERY SINGLE DAY. Maybe it's two or three times a week, depending on what the news is. The Phelps thing, for instance, should be the centerpiece of almost every sports section in the country if it happens. The United States basketball team beating Zimbabwe 167-4 in the first round of pool play, maybe not so much.

You seem to scoff at the notion of "serving the readers" and I sort of get where you're coming from. However, there's a danger in going the opposite direction as well. "You're going to read eight pages of old Olympics news and you're gonna like it, dammit."

You can still have plenty of Olympics coverage on the day you want to centerpiece something, you know, the reader actually cares about. It just won't be the top story that day.