The Joplin Globe spent the entire 2005 football season following the football exploits of my alma mater, East Newton High School. The results were published in a special section Sunday and it was well done.
The section was jam-packed with text and photos covering the nearly-completed season.
It is the kind of sports reporting that could boost the newspaper's well-deserved reputation of having a serviceable, but boring sports section.
Unfortunately, the section was just another indicator that the newspaper does not understand why it earns the reputation it has in its home city. If Joplin's hometown newspaper is going to spend an entire season with a school 30 miles away, it needs to counter-balance that with more in-depth coverage of the Joplin High School football team. (And hopefully, there is something in the works that will make this an unwarranted criticism.)
Some suggestions:
- Devote an entire page complete with extra photos to every Joplin High School football game.
-Add extra photo coverage of the school's Football Homecoming festivities, instead of just tacking a small picture above the fold on page one.
-Have a player or a coach write a diary of the entire season, and then run it at the end of the season, complete with photos.
-Beef up coverage of the junior varsity, freshman and middle school teams. If you capture those football parents' readership at the beginning of the seventh grade year, the odds are you will have them long after their children graduate.
-Have regular features spotlighting Joplin athletes, in all sports, not just football. Don't just look for the star athletes. Look for interesting stories. That was what I did with my Sports Talk column at The Carthage Press and The Lamar Democrat, and I was able to write more than 1,000 of those feature columns in just a little more than a decade.
-Use the Globe website for more of the coverage of junior varsity, freshman, and middle school sports. You can even hire school-age stringers to blog stories and statistics.
The only limit on what can be done with Joplin sports coverage is the limit of the Globe editors' imaginations. Unfortunately, that has been what has been holding back the newspaper's sports section for as long as I can remember.
2 comments:
I would like to see more coverage on the "minor" school sports. College Heights XC teams are headed to state. The girls have a chance of winning it all in class 1 and hardly any coverage. While my children go to a class 2 school, I have been impressed with CHCS in their 1st year for Cross Country.
I have a child going to state too and did also last year and barely a mention in any local papers.
These kids work just as hard as the major sports and for the top level XC runners it is year round.
When I was editor at The Carthage Press, we routinely assigned a reporter to go to the state cross country meet and provides photos and feature coverage. You are correct in your assessment of the Globe's coverage of so-called minor sports. For a long time, the same coverage was afforded women's sports, and even though the Globe does better now in that area, its coverage still leaves a lot to be desired. One thing I was always proud of during my tenure at The Press is that we provided nearly equal coverage between girls and boys sports. At the time, we were the only newspaper that sent a reporter to each high school volleyball match and girls baskeball game, home and away. It paid off in terms of readership and I can't recall ever receiving any complaints.
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