By Michael Szvetitz, Sports Editor
Auburn-Opelika (Ala.) News
It’s been seven months since Advance Publications rolled out its plan for the future: Cutting some of its major metros down to a three-day-a-week print schedule while beefing up their online presence.
Last month at the APSE Southeast Region Meeting in Birmingham, members from the first two groups to forge the trail — al.com and NOLA.com — talked about the challenges they’ve had to face, while also relating some of the successes.
The hardest challenge that the print product has had to face in the first year is figuring out which stories are relevant to the newspaper, which sometimes prints days after stories go live online, said former Birmingham News sports editor Tom Arenberg, who is now the print content manager for sports and news for the Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and Huntsville Times print products.
“My job is to look over the many, many offerings online and pick what goes into print for our three days of newspaper,” Arenberg said. “(At first) it was very difficult. It remains somewhat difficult because of some of the logistical issues, like, what do you put in the paper that’s not new anymore?”
The three Alabama Media Group papers of Advance print Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, which is the same for the New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLA.com).
Other challenges the print products face, according to Arenberg, are what to do with the “nuts and bolts” of sports coverage, like agate for professional and college sports, as well as “live coverage.”
“We have quit becoming a newspaper of record,” Arenberg said. “Your basic game reports, you’re not going to find in the paper day to day.
“Generally speaking our focus is anything … that’s not live news. There’s no point to focusing on basic live-news coverage when you’re only publishing three days a week.”
However, the Alabama papers are able to still provide their readers with the bread-and-butter of sports coverage in the state: college football.
Since Sunday is a normal print day, all the state’s college football coverage is able to get into print.
“We’re not out of the business there,” Arenberg said, adding that they also do a “bulldog” prep edition on Saturdays for all the high school football coverage.
Arenberg added, that if something is important enough, or if they can sell enough advertising for it, they’ll put out a print product that’s might not fall on their three-day schedule. Same for the Times-Picayune, which prints a Monday supplement for all its New Orleans Saints coverage.
“Saturday college football is on our print cycle, so there’s not much change there,” Arenberg said. “If there’s something major, we’re going to have something up.
“As a general rule, our non-football Sundays are enterprise stories, deep-feature stories, something like that (will get printed).
“I think there’s a huge group of people who are getting the quick-hits online, they don’t have time to get everything online, but hopefully they’re seeing the print as a supplement.”
There have been successes as well.
Doug Tatum, the sports manager for NOLA.com, said that in a time where newspaper staffs are being cut, he’s been able to add seven positions over the last year who are all digital reporters.
“Before we had 13 reporters and four managers … now have 20 reporters and four managers,” Tatum said. “We’ve seen an increase and deep commitment to expanding our sports coverage.
“There’s a deep commitment to making our coverage of the market better.”
With the money the company is saving from not printing four days a week, there’s more resources to go around.
“What this has done for us is, before I was dealing with furlough, cutting travel, less reporters. Now I have resources,” Tatum said.
And those resources are essential, especially in a market like New Orleans that has NFL and NBA franchisees, as well as plenty of interest in college football (particularly LSU), and hosted a Super Bowl this year.
“We reported from Monday through the following Monday, non-stop,” Tatum said of their coverage of the Super Bowl, which included a near-30-minute blackout. “We did probably did 10-12 different update in real-time during that delay. I think that shows the importance of digital: Giving what people need to know when it happens.”
