"You never cover us"

Not sure if the 17 gripes Brandon mentioned each came from a different person wanting coverage of a different team, but if that's the case, my inner cynic imagines that if Brandon finally does get a chance to do a story on one of those publicity malnourished entities, the other 16 complainants would leap into the comment thread and scream something along the lines of "This is news?!?!?!" or "NOBODY CARES ABOUT THIS!!!!!"

 

This is a non sequitir. People are complaining about lack of coverage on the youth level? We've been told grade school and high school kids don't even know what a newspaper is. If so why would they want coverage or care about coverage? Why let some guy with a tape recorder even on the premises if nobody knows what a newspaper even is? We've been told kids have no interest and 30 to 40 something parents don't subscribe either. Somebody's lying. There either is interest or there isn't in newspapers.

 

I think there is a lot of interest in reading those stories online, where most of the parents and young athletes actually look and spend their time. But online ads don't sell and papers haven't adjusted well enough (or at all) to becoming online news sources. Not that adjusting would make any sense, anyway, because there's no money to be made.

 

Their parents are interested as hell. They're the ones buying the paper and clipping out the stories about Little Johnny.

 

Then why are newspapers dead? You are saying there's a market for newspapers in your post.

 

No sir. Talk to the experts. The high school stories get very very very few page views. And that is ALL THAT MATTERS now.

 

You ever get, "You only cover us when we lose!"

 

Because that market is tiny.

 

Sure. It mostly comes from teams/schools that perpetually lose and get upset that no media was there to cover it when they finally won.

Years ago, when I covered high school sports, a doormat team had a rare winning season and somehow made a playoff run. So, of course we covered it and instead of being happy about it, parents and students spent the entire run griping that only now were they finally getting some coverage.

 

People like to think they are important. No paper = you're not important.

They are barely reading. They are not clipping.

You need thousands to support a paper, not 20 basketball moms.

 

And let me say what's sad...

Fewer and fewer people actually know if their local high school is good because no one gets the paper every day. I know shit is online, but are they really clicking the sports tab? Local TV isn't running standings. Unless you have a kid playing, you have no idea.

 

And the "We want to read high school coverage" or "youth sports" is 100 percent bullshit.

No one wants to read blanket "high school coverage." They want Podunk East High School, or whatever school they are interested in. You could have 10 pages of high school coverage every single day, but unless it includes Podunk East every day, they will bitch about how you never cover any high schools.