Yahoo levels Miami

It seems like in a lot of markets it is the alt weeklies that get these kind of stories, for the reasons mentioned.

 

You (you = newsroom leadership) choose which daily beasts to feed. If you really think it's more important to get three grafs whenever the third-string mike backer coughs than it is to go get investigative stories, well, that's your choice. Your bottom line doesn't depend on notebooks and capsules.

There's never been a better time to take risks than now. It's not like circulation declines are going to get *worse.*

 

I totally agree with this. But I don't think many decision makers do.

 

Bottom line is that even as newsrooms are stripped the powers-that-be (above the sports editors) seem to want the same number of local bylines in the paper as before plus pumped-up web content.

Not many papers are taking a breath and focusing on what they could do better or what readers want or how they can still do do great sports journalism.

 

Have you ever covered a major beat? I'm not being condescending. I'm asking.

Those three graphs on the mike linebacker that you scoff at are eaten hook, line, and sinker by the reading public. They absolutely can't get enough of it, particularly when it comes to major college programs and NFL teams. I could write an enterprise piece and it would get almost no attention whatsoever. I could write a piece about the battle for the back-up QB position and it would send the hits needle skyrocketing.

I'm not saying that reader interest and "hits" should totally drive coverage. It's more complicated than that. But it's certainly more complicated than, "Back off daily coverage of what I consider boring and produce more enterprise in its place." You need both, but fans eat up the between-the-lines stuff to a degree that we probably don't recognize from our ivory journalistic towers.

 

I have covered a beat, many years ago. Now, I'm just one of those "readers" who wants something to read. I get the between-the-lines stuff from too many other sources, 16 hours before my newspaper arrives.

 

There are not many newspaper reporters left who write strictly for print, including Dick, who is clearly talking about web hits.

 

@Ace: Understood. It's really just a question of priorities. If your priority is filling the news feed, great. If your priority is making the big hits, great. It's damn hard to do both. I'd like to think in this nothing-to-lose atmosphere, though, that newsroom leadership would put more emphasis on the latter.

 

I totally agree that newsrooms need to look at what they are doing and what is the best use of their time, talents and resources rather than doing what they always did plus throwing a bunch of stuff on the web.

But you have this old guard running the show and few web-savvy folks being hired.

So you mostly get the same old stuff and more pressure to produce. You end up with the easy and sure stories -- news from practice, press conferences, advances, etc.

 

You don't get the inside-the-clubhouse stuff that the local sources give you. Follow a team on ESPN.com and then follow it in your local newspaper. There's no comparison. And I'm not saying newspapers do it completely right. They don't. Not at all. But you can't very well just start dropping stuff like position battles and injury updates. I hate it, too, but readers demand it.

 

I'm going to agree with Dick and say that if your resources are stretched extremely thin, you have to take care of "the football" before you take care of the big investigative pieces.

You should do both, but if you've got one guy doing a school beat, and his backup covering 10 other things, you're just not going to be able to turn somebody loose on a story like this.

"News from practice, press conferences, advances" isn't sexy or groundbreaking, but you can't lose sight of the fact that it's also what most people reading the sports section are after.