APSE’s Southeast Region is the heart of college football country. Chair Jon Johnson, sports editor of the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle, asked editors from his
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| Jon Johnson |
region about their approaches to the season. Here are some of the responses:
■ Daily Tribune News (Cartersville, Ga.), Chris Stephens:
This year, we are having our first-ever Weekend Football Section that will come out in Friday papers. We will be previewing all of the high school, college and pro games in our area in a separate section from sports. We did this to free up room during the week to cover more high school sports, and it allows us to have game previews fresh instead of one each day of the week, whereby Friday most people have forgotten about it.
We should have about the same amount of space, but our local content will never suffer. We cut from the national wire first. If that means that our 4-5 pages in the Sunday section are all local, then so be it. We will still travel to away games like usual. We just look at the schedule and figure out what is the best for us and use our stringers like crazy. Football season is the only time of year we are allowed to have stringers, so we make sure to get the maximum out of them.
■ Florence Times Daily, Gregg Dewalt:
Our space, as of right now, is going to remain relatively the same. We are more into content sharing with Decatur and Anniston, but we still plan to attend the bulk of Alabama and Auburn games – home and away – in some capacity.
We’re talking with MaxPreps about adding high school stats to our web page, we’re looking to add a few blogs (we haven’t done that in the past) and I’ll continue to do my preps preview show on the Web each week.
■ Pensacola News Journal, Bill Vilona:
We’ll have our own high school sports Web site that will include photos of all football and volleyball players in the fall, as well as stats and other content. It’s through Gannett’s High School Sports.Net that Gannett bought, but we’ve finally worked out all the bugs to make it operational for us. In addition, we’re partnering with the Gulf Coast Youth Football Alliance to utilize access to a youth football web-only site. We’ll also have a Flora-Bama college site for news on FSU, Florida Gators, Alabama and Auburn – the four schools that have divided fan bases in this area.
As of right now, I do not anticipate any reductions in space. It will remain basically the same as last year. As for travel, we’re on an island here. We don’t travel to college football or pro games. If our high school teams reach region championship or state championship level, we do staff those games.
■ Tuscaloosa News, Tommy Deas:
So far we haven’t had a decrease in space in the sports sections (maybe 4-5 slim sections but at least as many with more space than normal). I have asked for extra space for a few projects this summer and got it with no more than the usual hassles.
I don’t expect any cutback in space during football season. Our travel budget is light this year with the University of Alabama playing its far-away regular opponents (Tennessee, LSU, Arkansas) at home this season. Kentucky is the only major road trip and we are flying three reporters and a couple of photographers to that game. As for Web coverage of football, we have already shot video profiles of coaches and players at some of our prominent local prep teams (we had a mid-July media day at the paper and got decent response). To cover the slow time of summer we did a fan poll on our Tidesports.com web site on the top UA player at each position – basically one position a week. The final product with all the winners goes up this week, since practice begins next week.
We’ll do the same kind of Web things we’ve been doing, but maybe in greater volume – sending 2-3 cameras to UA football practices, getting video of Nick Saban and players from press opportunities.
■ Macon Telegraph, Daniel Shirley:
We have killed out two Gameday preview sections. Last year, we did one for preps on Friday and colleges on Saturday, but we have lost three people in a little more than a year, and those sections were rough to produce last year. But, this year, we’re adding a four-page wrap that will go around the entire paper for high school live game coverage for Saturday mornings.
Our space should be about the same for football, but our coverage will have to adjust because we have to find a way to get more than one person to UGA games. We’re looking into that. We had a really talented stringer in Athens who just got a full-time job at a paper.
■ Orlando Sentinel, Tim Stephens:
The Magic’s ride to the NBA Finals kept the Orlando Sentinel busy early in the summer, including a 56-page tabloid special section, but we quickly turned our attention to football.
The Sentinel recently re-designed its Web site and launched an extensive recruiting channel that includes breaking news, photos, videos, player bios, rankings and watch lists, as well as a searchable database. That was followed by a channel devoted entirely to coverage of Florida Gators QB Tim Tebow.
The Sentinel announced the addition of Phil Steele, publisher of the annual football preview magazines, and Chris Huston, publisher of the Web site HeismanPundit.com, as guest bloggers for its College Gridiron 365 blog. The Sentinel also will partner with HeismanPundit.com to produce and distribute a weekly Heisman Trophy poll during the college football season. In August, the Sentinel will host its first Varsity Media Day, sponsored by Buca di Beppo, bringing 50 of the top high school football players in Central Florida to the paper for a day of interviews, photos and videos.
We expect a slight decrease in space. Our efforts will center on three core topics: Magic, college football and local high schools/recruiting. We’ll cut back slightly on the NFL, golf and NASCAR and will streamline some of our national college coverage. We will not travel full-time with the NFL this year but will increase travel with our college teams.
