The holidays at the end of the year can be a tricky time for sports departments, whether it's a dearth of events that leads to planning plenty of enterprise or an overwhelming number of high school holiday tournament games that need to be covered while also scheduling days off.
Dozens of sports editors were asked for tips or advice on managing the holidays and continuing to produce a section up to their standards. The replies are listed below:
(In addition, sports editors discuss year-end packages in this forum.)
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We talk in advance about stories for slow days or periods (Christmas, for example) that will keep our section stockings stuffed.
We ask each reporter to have something "evergreen" for the final two weeks of December — and also consider year-end packages, photo packages, freshened online repurposing, etc.
Also, columnist Sean Keeler launched an NCAA Tournament bracket where readers can vote for their favorite all-time college players in Iowa, round by round, until a champion is crowned.
— Bryce Miller, Des Moines Register
Filling the holiday sections is never a problem for us, with two bowl games between Christmas and New Year's Day (and this year, the BCS championship shortly thereafter), plus plenty of NBA/NFL/NHL coverage.
The challenge is juggling time-off requests to make sure we have enough hands to do the work. But since this is more-or-less part of our culture now, everyone understands the need to work over the holidays.
— Mark Faller, Arizona Republic
We try to take advantage of the slow college basketball week by running our high school previews for the winter season and our all-star teams from the fall season.
We do plan enterprise for later in the month, specifically for Friday and Sunday. But no matter what, at least one reporter is always on vacation and we do end up running more wire than usual because we usually get more space than we need as the papers are bigger.
This season is more promising for good stories because the UConn women are chasing a record winning streak and the UConn football team is going to the Fiesta Bowl. Also, we plan to run our regional football all-star team on Sunday, Dec. 26. That should attract a lot of interest.
— Gary Rogo, Connecticut Post (Bridgeport, Conn.)
In order to compensate for employees using vacation and holiday time, we also try to have several advance feature and enterprise articles that we can have to strengthen holiday sections. We rotate among our three main layout people so that a different person works Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's — and they're the only person on our staff in that day. We also use stringers to cover events to help make up for full-timers who may be off.
— Aaron Dorksen, The Daily Record (Wooster, Ohio)
We've usually packaged our All-Star football team and year-end package on or around the Christmas Day edition or the ensuing weekend edition. The state finals are Dec. 17-18, and we had our last team knocked out in the semifinals, so it's still relatively timely.
This year, we'll do our All-Star football team on Dec. 25, which will again be a centerpiece illustration and a listing of the teams inside, with headshots and bios.
We also tabulate stats of all 34 teams in our district (even though we only cover slightly more than half, but that helps with coverage since they all play each other) and run them in their entirety. Abridged versions run with weekly previews. Everyone who touched the ball gets their name in the paper one last time, plus a complete listing of the season's results and team stats for each school. It usually fills up two wide-open pages.
We'll have a handful of high school tournaments this year on Dec. 27-30, and we'll have our usual supply of Penn State bowl coverage that our sister paper, the Altoona Mirror, provides most of.
We don't have as many holiday tournaments as we used to, since the PIAA cut the high school regular season by two games and as a result most of our schools either cut their tipoff tourney appearance or their holiday tourney appearance.
From a reader standpoint this year, it also doesn't hurt that the Steelers and Eagles will be in the thick of things. We've got plenty of fans supporting each team. It's all AP stuff, but it's still pretty popular.
— Ben Brigandi, Williamsport (Pa.) Sun Gazette
We keep enough staffers scheduled so we can keep a schedule going, but it's a downtime for high schools and most area colleges, so it's primarily pro coverage and a thin desk. But, we are thin, with a lot of folks getting their last vacation days in. We do the best we can and try to plan ahead enough to have stories on slow days.
— Scott Monserud, Denver Post
We have the same problems everyone does around the holiday with vacations. We’ve got a few rules. No more than one of our Page 1 columnists can take vacation at the same time, and no more than one of our Page 2 columnists can take vacation at the same time. I try also to restrict vacations among me and my two deputies to one of us at any given time. In addition, on our major beats, at least one reporter needs to be on duty, whether that’s in the off-season or during heavy vacation time like the Christmas holiday.
That said, we run into staffing problems and simply have to get creative sometimes.
Fortunately, things can slow down a bit during that two-or-three-week period (we don’t have a college football team in a bowl game this year, for example). So, basically, we’ve got no sure cure for the holiday blues, but we always seem to manage.
As for major events, Christmastime is fairly quiet, with the notable exception of the Lakers-Heat game on Christmas Day in Staples. We’ll have that fully staffed with the beat reporters, NBA columnist and Bill Plaschke. The next major event, of course, is the Rose Bowl, which will also be fully staffed. Everyone on those beats fully understands that those events are something they need to work their personal lives around.
— Mike James, Los Angeles Times
Typically, this has not been a problem for us since we have most of our major beats (NFL, NBA and college basketball) going then. Vacations are planned carefully and enterprise is stockpiled to cover the lean days or to accommodate early deadline nights. Plus, sections are smaller. Most years, slow summer days are more of a challenge in our market than the busier holiday season.
— Jim Lefko, Indianapolis Star
In all honesty, with the layoffs we've had this year, including more on Dec. 6, we are so depleted that we can't plan from one day to the next.
I have arranged for my columnist to do a "Christmas wishes" type of column since our deadlines are horrendous on Christmas eve and Christmas day. We also have features stockpiled; not necessarily Christmas related.
— Mary Ullmer, Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press
Yes, we certainly do plan. Plan, plan, plan.
We don't lower our standards at all during the holidays. Indeed,
typically both BYU and Utah are playing in bowl games during that
time, so it can often mean we have special sections in addition to
the dailies.
The key is we plan, plan, plan well in advance. … We also make it
a point to take into account that it's the holidays, too. Many of my managers are working four-day weeks and such during this time, that's part of the planning.
— Michael Anastasi, Salt Lake Tribune
For the staffing, this year we did plan out an enterprise package that we worked on over the summer when it was much slower. We started running the series just after Thanksgiving and will run the final stories the Sunday after Christmas. It has helped give us something to build our Sunday pages around.
The Southeast Missourian sponsors a boys basketball tournament that takes place during the week between Christmas and New Year. It features 15 of our local teams, so it's important to have most of the staff available that week. It makes holiday scheduling difficult, but it's what we build our pages around the week between Christmas and New Year's.
— Kevin Winters Morriss, Southeast Missourian (Cape Girardeau, Mo.)
At this time of year, it's a challenging juggle between staffing and producing content. Not sure if there is ever a "good" time in sports to take vacation time, but usually over the holidays is one of the better times for us. I can't allow a mass exodus during that time, but I try to balance it out so no one person is stuck working the holidays.
I also try and use this time to do some of the features/enterprise stories we often don't have time or get lost in the shuffle around the holidays. Stories like "Hometown Heroes" on local athletes or coaches who are at the college or professional levels. We localize if there are any ties to bowl games with players and coaches.
There isn't an annual sporting event that dominates our coverage, but usually something going on. In terms of our major beat, the University of Wyoming, we use the holidays to do analysis or enterprise pieces as both the men's and women's basketball squads get ready for conference play in early January.
— Robert Gagliardi, WyoSports/Wyoming Tribune Eagle (Cheyenne, Wyo.)
Since we have just three people in our department and two will be off during the Christmas week, we're going to run our fall all-area teams to help offset the lack of local content. We don't have much going on anyway since there are no local holiday hoops tournaments we will be covering, so we can survive (hopefully) with one person in that week. We will try to balance it out with the all-area stuff as well as some evergreen stories the best we can.
— David Fawcett, News & Messenger (Manassas, Va.)
We're somewhat lucky in that we always seem to have a lot going on to cover during the holidays. We have the Poinsettia and Holiday bowls locally. We also have a ton of high school soccer and basketball tournaments.
We typically put a lot of focus on those the weeks of Christmas and New Year's. We usually do a big feature to advance the biggest basketball tournament (it usually draws four or five of the top teams in the country) and then try to cover at least two games each day.
Chargers coverage is also big for us during this time and helps give us some good centerpiece possibilities.
— Eric Breier, North County Times (Escondido, Calif.)
We are fortunate at the TimesDaily to have plenty going on during the holidays.
First, we save our all-area volleyball, cross country and small- and big-school all-area teams for the days around Christmas – it’s four days of centerpieces that can be done in advance and ready to go when we are short staffed.
We also have the Division II national championship football game, so we have a week of good content the week before Christmas.
We also sponsor a 16-team boys basketball tournament that runs over four days either just before or just after the championship game, and of course, Alabama and Auburn usually are in bowl games, so there is plenty of local college football content.
We’re a small staff, so everybody takes turns working the holidays. I try to be fair and equitable, and I bring in some part-timers to answer the phones during the post-Christmas tournament frenzy to make sure everybody gets their regular off time.
— Gregg Dewalt, Florence (Ala.) TimesDaily
We do try to have at least a few features to get through any lean periods. We've been fortunate the Air Force football is in its fourth straight bowl game so that is our major focus.
Staffing has changed so much both in numbers and organization, but we try to allow folks time off as possible without being too thin, and editors help out in a pinch to help in that process.
— Jim O'Connell, Colorado Springs Gazette
As for filling the sections, we almost always have University of Alabama bowl coverage and, especially this year, the coaching carousel with assistants and what-not.
But we do a couple of things special on an annual basis:
1) On Dec. 25, Christmas Day, for the last 3-4 years we have run our "Alabama's Most Wanted" top-50 recruiting update. We outsource to a recruiting guru (although next year, I anticipate this to be done in-house) to do capsules on the top 50 recruits in the state of Alabama — breakdown of stats, what schools they are considering, etc., with mugshots of each. It eats up a color double-truck. We run the first Top 50 on July 4 and update it on Dec. 25, with guys moving up or down according to how their seasons affected their recruiting status.
On the web, we release it 40-50, then 30-40, 20-30, 10-20 and top 10 counting down.
I chose the hoilday dates because I've always understood that the holiday papers are the most-read section of all, with the family (often extended) around the house all day and sooner or later pretty much everyone picks up the paper. Those are also notoriously slow days for rack sales, and our circulation people tell me that project gives us an up-tick so that a couple of normally bad days for rack sales end up selling at or above a normal date.
Plus, doing them on those specific holidays has kind of branded the project in people's minds to know when to expect it. I start getting calls and e-mails asking "are you going to do that again this year" in the week or two leading up to it.
2) The other thing we do is our high school football all-stars (Super 11) for the season, which runs on Christmas Eve. At our shop, this is a photo project — we work with our photographers to develop some kind of theme (for football, basketball and spring sports) and they spend a few weeks taking the shots. We've done comic book-style, baseball card-style, jigsaw-puzzle, etc. It's a very neat art project that resonates in our community.
— Tommy Deas, Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News
We've got some perennials we do during the holiday stretch. We do a gift guide — gives the staff a chance to tell people what they'd like as gifts.
Our columnist Berry Tramel writes a Christmas Day column that has become a tradition.
This year, we are running a year in pictures spread featuring our photographers' picks for the best images of 2010.
With the Oklahoma City Thunder playing at home eight of 10 games during the holiday stretch, we'll be doing packages off them (including one on the NBA's scheduling gift to the team and its fans).
But the biggest thing that carries us through the holiday stretch is the college bowl season, and we use that as an opportunity to do some enterprise that looks back on the regular season and ahead to the bowl matchups.
— Mike Sherman, The Oklahoman
With a full-time staff of three plus interns, our situation is different than larger papers. We're a five evening (actually late-morning), Saturday and Sunday morning paper, and we have a locally-written column (by me or one of my staffers) every day of the year.
The Buffalo Bills, who I cover home-and-away, and St. Bonaventure basketball are great fodder for columns and features at holiday time.
One thing that does help (we only work four office shifts on holiday weeks, though I do a ton of writing at home) is that we have trained interns to do the agate page, which aids in scheduling.
Needless to say, I benefit from having guys who have worked for me for 25 years each (minimum) and share my attitude that you work until you're done. That said, I won't schedule any full-timer (including myself) for more than four office shifts in a holiday week.
— Chuck Pollock, Oleans (N.Y.) Times Herald
We’ve started running a series of “all-area” profiles for the fall sports during Christmas Week.
In Georgia, that includes football, softball, volleyball and cross country. We package the football around Christmas and then fill in the gaps with the other sports.
As for staffing, we’re at a bare minimum most of the time. Our copy desk is part of a universal desk now, so that’s not as big a worry as in past years. The writers typically take off a few days around Christmas but pitch in if needed or if something breaks.
— John Boyette, Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle
For Christmas, we run our high school football all-star team, which takes care of three of our pages, including two stories, photos of all the players and a graphic of the first team. The team is selected in early December, giving our football writer time to get everything done in advance. We can do the design and production the week of Christmas so the guy on desk Christmas Eve doesn't have much to do. We run the rest of our all-stars (field hockey, soccer, etc) the day after Christmas to eat up a bunch of space in that section, and again we are able to do it well in advance.
For New Year's, it is basically bowl (Penn State stuff) preview for us.
As far as staffing goes, we've run into quite a bit of problems. First off, since the summer of 2008, we have gotten a week off without pay every quarter except one, so we have a ton of time to take (I have one writer with five weeks vacation and four weeks unpaid tacked on, so we don't have our most experienced guy for 45 days of the year). Then we had someone leave our staff just before Thanksgiving, so we are short-staffed and dealing with vacation/unpaid days near the end of the year. Fortunately, we are able to do a lot of stuff in advance, which does enable us to keep our production level up. But, basically, if you are not on a desk shift, you are off.
— Bill Bowman, Sunbury (Pa.) Daily Item/The Danville News
At The Seattle Times, we try to get a couple of bigger features done for the holidays.
Usually a good prep enterprise also helps. This year we also will let the Holiday Bowl stories help carry us. Since the Seahawks/NFL are still playing, that helps.
Just acknowledging that the holidays require more features to carry us — which we'll do at the weekly planning meeting — also helps. Finally, we just realize and accept that things will drop off a bit.
— Don Shelton, Seattle Times
The biggest issue for us is desk staffing during the holidays and making sure there are enough people to produce the paper. That period usually coincides with the last week of the NFL season, so there is always plenty for us to write on the Eagles.
I think we focus in a little more on making sure we have a thriving section during the holidays, but beyond the year-end package, I think we operate as usual in terms of content.
— Josh Barnett, Philadelphia Daily News
During the holiday week, we typically run our all-star teams for high school sports for the fall sports (we call them our All-Middle Georgia teams). We do teams (and a player of the year) for football, softball and boys and girls cross country. As far as producing the section, we enlist the help of our news copy desk to help get the section out on certain days (although, since dropping from nine people when I started to six, including five here in Macon, we're going to begin to teach our writers to do desk work to get through holidays and vacations).
Last year, we added a team of the decade for Georgia, Georgia Tech and Middle Georgia high school football.
— Daniel Shirley, Macon (Ga.) Telegraph
We suffer somewhat around the holidays for the reasons everybody else does. We do have some features, but we usually end up with a dry weekend or two in there. Between the time off and holiday tournaments, I think it's inevitable.
— Greg Brownell, Glens Falls (N.Y.) Post-Star
As for preparing and executing things during the holidays, it is pretty tough. We do have a number of holiday tournaments that help beef up our coverage and we do not print a paper Christmas Day, so that helps. Still, the day after Christmas paper may prove to be a little thin, though the Celtics playing on Christmas Day helps those of us in New England.
— Scott Martin, Kennebec Journal/Augusta (Maine) Morning Sentinel
We plan a Christmas memories package for our weekly prep sections where we ask athletes and coaches to submit their favorite memories of the season along with photos from the occasion.
We also conduct our organization's prep basketball classic on Jan. 1.
— Gregory Smith, Times of Northwest Indiana
Springfield has four high school basketball tournaments in town between Christmas and New Year’s: the boys Blue & Gold (count that as two, since it’s separate 16-team brackets and crowns two champions) and the girls Pink & White and the KTXR Lady Classic. You can imagine the strain on resources that presents every year. Newshole is an issue, for one thing.
— Pam Clark, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader
We keep it simple just because we only have three full-time writers and one travels home to California for a week in there. We have some local freelancers to pick up the slack for us for the few live events we do have during that time.
The week before Christmas (and ending on Dec. 25) we run our all-area fall sports teams and players of the year for the seven fall sports– girls tennis: girls golf, volleyball, boys soccer, boys and girls cross country, football. That takes care of our centerpiece art package and top story on the Web every day.
We also have three Christmas basketball tournaments (two before, one after the holiday), so we’ll staff those games, have photo galleries that get great Web traffic and several blog posts and live chats from those events that people can watch at work or from the couch at home.
— Dan Spears, Wilmington (N.C.) StarNews
