No, you CAN'T root in the damn press box

[swingline]

Bought out the Speedo store, did ya?

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

Good.

I think if you limit her comments to the before, during and after of the Penn State scandals, yes, she's right about Penn State writers.

If you widen out and try to tell me that the average sportswriter - who already works as a critic and a crime reporter, a political analyst and profile writer, a business correspondent, statistical expert and travel writer - couldn't do her job, I'd tell her she's nuts.

That said, the Penn State / Sandusky story was a five-alarm failure of every principle and practice in sports and local journalism, a perfect collapse of the moral and ethical imperatives the job requires, even of us, and an object lesson in the sort of willful and terrible blindness boosterism and homerism can lead to.

Considering the bulk of these people couldn't objectively cover Franklin scoring a trash touchdown ("Franklin bet PSU to cover LOL!") with six seconds left Saturday, nothing's changed.

 

[Alma]

I am so glad I don't work somewhere with pageview quotas, since all I've seen as somebody who watches those boards (on my own laptop at home) has proven my inability to control clicks.



I wish that was true. But right now, the only thing getting clicks is high school football. No college, no pros. And, alas, no other high school sports. (It's fall, duh! )

But our overall pageviews often seem dependent on the way the stories are played on the website.

That roundup of unstaffed weekend football games that was posted two days late suddenly blows up when it's at the top of the site. But field hockey, volleyball, tennis... Digital always asks why we should put those (allegedly) low-traffic stories up top, completely not acknowledging the emails from Corporate about how people don't scroll and thus won't be finding them if they're way down below -- or not on the homepage at all. (I wish our SEO was good enough to drive more traffic than people coming to the homepage itself. But most days, it's not.)

Heaven forbid a feature is done off a sport that isn't football. Or even, sometimes, football from a smaller school.

Things are a bit more balanced the rest of the year, but story play online still seems to have a large role in what gets clicked.

Yeah, I think some of those stories go at the top of the site, and then just see how they do. Experimentation is kind of part of it.

I think non-football features can do well. They do do well. Gotta be played right on the site and have good headlines.

The argument I'd make is they can have some value, analytics. And they don't always tell you the lowest common denominator stuff. And they can be helpful with a writer who's really set in his ways. If readers are telling you, consistently, high school volleyball outpaces independent league baseball, then gear back on the baseball in August and turn up the preseason VB feature volume irrespective of how the writer feels about it.

One of the broad takeaways I've seen is girls' sports remains undercovered and fourth-tier baseball is overindulged.

 

[Small Town Guy]

Gonna need SJ to weigh in on my actions during the 1994-1995 hoops season, when I wrote numerous gamers for the local community college team that our 6-day-a-week paper covered...while I was also the sixth man for that community college team. There was no cheering from the press box but certainly from the bench and definitely on the court when I drained the clinching free throws as we picked up a key victory over our hated rival.

I'd like to think I delivered fair coverage.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

Gonna need SJ to weigh in on my actions during the 1994-1995 hoops season, when I wrote numerous gamers for the local community college team that our 6-day-a-week paper covered...while I was also the sixth man for that community college team. There was no cheering from the press box but certainly from the bench and definitely on the court when I drained the clinching free throws as we picked up a key victory over our hated rival.

I'd like to think I delivered fair coverage.

"I wasn't worried about the pressure," exclaimed Small Town Guy after he drained two free throws with 0.7 seconds left to lift Jupiter Junior College past Saturn Junior College, 68-67. #CrossThreading

 

[Liut]

"I wasn't worried about the pressure," exclaimed Small Town Guy after he drained two free throws with 0.7 seconds left to lift Jupiter Junior College past Saturn Junior College, 68-67. #CrossThreading

LOL! You can be so subtle even when you ain't.

 

[Liut]

Gonna need SJ to weigh in on my actions during the 1994-1995 hoops season, when I wrote numerous gamers for the local community college team that our 6-day-a-week paper covered...while I was also the sixth man for that community college team. There was no cheering from the press box but certainly from the bench and definitely on the court when I drained the clinching free throws as we picked up a key victory over our hated rival.

I'd like to think I delivered fair coverage.

Cool story.
I assume readers were aware you were pursuing a career in journalism and respected your desire to get experience?
Curious, also, what it was like to refer to yourself in the third person? Especially since you yourself iced it.
In the stringers' thread, I posted about a high school kid who knocked on the door. Real go-getter. Eventually, I wrote a column about the kid ... who placed the column, my mug and HIS mug on the page.
Thanks for sharing.

 

[Liut]

By Small Town Guy

"I wasn't worried about the pressure," exclaimed Small Town Guy after he drained two free throws with 0.7 seconds left to lift Jupiter Junior College past Saturn Junior College, 68-67. #CrossThreading

 

[exmediahack]

Yeah, I think some of those stories go at the top of the site, and then just see how they do. Experimentation is kind of part of it.

I think non-football features can do well. They do do well. Gotta be played right on the site and have good headlines.

The argument I'd make is they can have some value, analytics. And they don't always tell you the lowest common denominator stuff. And they can be helpful with a writer who's really set in his ways. If readers are telling you, consistently, high school volleyball outpaces independent league baseball, then gear back on the baseball in August and turn up the preseason VB feature volume irrespective of how the writer feels about it.

One of the broad takeaways I've seen is girls' sports remains undercovered and fourth-tier baseball is overindulged.

Yup. I've told coworker after coworker that NO ONE cares if the minor-league baseball/hockey team in the market wins or loses unless it's the finals or the championships. No. One. Cares.

There was a push to try and do HS football coverage again and it flickered for a while with management. As the only news guy who was a sports guy, my answer was simple:

If you cover football on Fridays, you need to cover female sports on Thursdays, whether it's volleyball or soccer.

"I don't want to be busting my butt to help on this and answer emails about why we're only covering one boys sport."

And if you're going to do this, you need to cover winter sports. I explained it should be easier to get a title sponsor for more content but they backed away quick.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

I fought this battle with our bosses at my former Gannett shop about our minor-league baseball coverage for years.

If you poll fans walking out of the gates and ask them who won the game and what the score was, my contention was very few could answer both questions. Maybe(?) half could tell you who won, and maybe a quarter of them remembered the score. So the typical game coverage story is a waste of time, and the metrics showed that. So cover it differently - heavy on features, personality pieces, get to know the players and tell their stories about how they got to this point, their background, what life as a minor-leaguer is really like.

Made me an enemy for life with the old-school beat writer who was determined to do the old-school gamer, "Smith drove in two runs with a double into the left-field corner in the fourth inning." But I'm fine with that.

 

[Liut]

Yup. I've told coworker after coworker that NO ONE cares if the minor-league baseball/hockey team in the market wins or loses unless it's the finals or the championships. No. One. Cares.

There was a push to try and do HS football coverage again and it flickered for a while with management. As the only news guy who was a sports guy, my answer was simple:

If you cover football on Fridays, you need to cover female sports on Thursdays, whether it's volleyball or soccer.

"I don't want to be busting my butt to help on this and answer emails about why we're only covering one boys sport."

And if you're going to do this, you need to cover winter sports. I explained it should be easier to get a title sponsor for more content but they backed away quick.

Maybe I'm confused, but what WAS covered in sports?

 

[Batman]

I fought this battle with our bosses at my former Gannett shop about our minor-league baseball coverage for years.

If you poll fans walking out of the gates and ask them who won the game and what the score was, my contention was very few could answer both questions. Maybe(?) half could tell you who won, and maybe a quarter of them remembered the score. So the typical game coverage story is a waste of time, and the metrics showed that. So cover it differently - heavy on features, personality pieces, get to know the players and tell their stories about how they got to this point, their background, what life as a minor-leaguer is really like.

Made me an enemy for life with the old-school beat writer who was determined to do the old-school gamer, "Smith drove in two runs with a double into the left-field corner in the fourth inning." But I'm fine with that.

It took me a while to figure that out, but I eventually did. We have a Double-A team in the area (not in town, but close enough that people often make the drive over) and I eventually realized that people don't view it so much as sports as they do the night's entertainment. You can spend $30 or $40 to go to a movie, or to a ballgame. heck, even the day-t0-day results don't matter much to the players and coaches. It's all about player development. If the players are any good they'll be gone pretty quickly.
On top of that, our deadlines and print schedule suck for covering it. By the time we print, they've played at least one more game.
What I've ended up doing is going two or three times a year and putting together a photo gallery for online and a package for print. Usually on Wednesday, for online that night and Friday's print edition. I'll keep it short, include a couple of paragraphs about the game, and tease to the promotions and schedule for the weekend games. It's always good to have some file art for the guys who get called up later on, as well. If we were closer I might try to do some features, but that's not really logistically feasible.