The Seattle Times took a different approach to try to break out of the doldrums of late August, covering a Mariners team headed for 100 losses while the Seahawks and Washington Huskies football teams were struggling to regain legitimacy.
The Times produced a couple of outside-the-box projects highlighting just how bad things were.
First came "Swing Away, Mariners fans!" which invited Mariners fans to vent on a baseball team headed toward its second 100-loss season in three years. Readers were asked to let the M's feel their pain any way they wanted: artwork, photos, videos, prose, poetry. In addition to one person who wrote eight haikus in a few hours, the project had about 150 responses, including a song, many poems (good and bad), two sketches/cartoons and a bumper sticker. The best submissions were published in the paper, and a longer package appeared online.
Two weeks after the series ran, sports editor Don Shelton was still receiving letters.
Then came a three-part series about why Seattle's three major teams were/are so bad. The series, called "Bottoming Out," was conceived by columnist Jerry Brewer, who wrote the opening piece. Beat reporters for the Mariners, Seahawks and Huskies each wrote about what went wrong, with a mainbar, a timeline of key mistakes, five factors contributing to the teams’ downfall and a short assessment of where they were heading next.
Bob Condotta, Danny O'Neil and Geoff Baker's stories pulled together events that had been written about over the years but never put in this kind of perspective. National baseball columnist Larry Stone addressed the future of the Mariners in a sidebar, and columnist Steve Kelley ended the series with a piece about why things were going to get better quickly.
NORTHEAST
The Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.)
The sports department won three awards in the New England Associated Press News Executives Association contest.
The T&G took first and second place in deadline sports writing. Dave Nordman, Paul Jarvey and Jim Wilson earned top honors for their story about former Red Sox minor-league pitcher Greg Montalbano's lost battle with cancer. Second place went to Jennifer Toland for her story about the departure of Holy Cross basketball coach Ralph Willard.
The T&G's high school sports magazine and website, Hometeam (www.telegram.com/hometeam), won first place in the non-daily publications category for the second straight year. The magazine is published five times a year.
New York Times
The paper received two awards in the New York Newspaper Publishers Association contest, winning for best sports coverage for presentation of the 2009 U.S. Open golf tournament and for online graphics for "Green Speeds, a Weapon and a Signature at the Open" by Joe Ward, Mika Gröndahl and Shan Carter.
Alan Schwarz won a Society of Professional Journalists award in sports reporting for his revelations on the longterm dangers of concussions.
The Recorder (Amsterdam, N.Y.)
The Recorder just finished two special sections — a 16-page 2010 High School Football Guide and a 48-page full-color NFL Guide. The Recorder will also be doing a total overhaul of its website in the near future.
MID-ATLANTIC
Scranton Times-Tribune
In early summer, The Times-Tribune had its 60th annual Athlete of the Week awards ceremony to honor the 40 athletes of the week during the high school season. The ceremony takes place in The Scranton Times auditorium. During the event, which was attended by about 150 people, the male and female athletes of the year were announced. A double-truck looked back on the athletes’ accomplishments.
The beginning of July marked the launch of "Rec Room," a page in the Sunday edition dedicated to recreational sports in Northeast Pennsylvania. The page includes a feature story, a personality profile, standings/results of everything from billiards to horseshoes to softball to darts, and a package of submitted photos. Feature stories have been on an ultramarathoner, a table tennis club, a BMX race track, a martial arts expert, etc.
For the fall, high school football reporter Joby Fawcett was armed with a video camera as he hit all of the 20 schools the Times-Tribune covers for preseason previews. "Around the Camps, with Joby Fawcett" was a video tour of all 20 schools in the first week of two-a-day practices. Fawcett files a video report from each site as well as a story about the team for print, and this also was part of the preseason Top 10 countdown.
Williamsport (Pa.) Sun-Gazette
The paper recently completed another Little League World Series, during which it produced a daily 6-page wrap for the entire 10 days of the series, which ran from Aug. 20-29. A 24-page tab section was published on the first day of the Series.
Sunbury (Pa.) Daily Item
The sports department produced a 64-page fall preview tab on an early deadline. The copy deadline was Aug. 22 (the day after the first scrimmage). The section printed on Aug. 25 and was published on Aug. 27, a full week before the first game. After that, the department began producing the Game Night edition, which publishes every Thursday for 12 weeks through the second week of the high school football playoffs.
Harrisburg Patriot-News
About 70 people attended a monthly town meeting — the first one in Hershey — which featured the paper’s Bears beat writer, the team broadcaster and several other American Hockey League personalities. The event was free, and some copies of the Bears' front-page championship cover were made available for the taking. The paper is planning one meeting a month involving different teams and topics at spots around the midstate.
The Erie (Pa.) Times-News
The paper produced a 112-page high school football preview magazine, which is being sold on newsstands for $5 a copy.
SOUTHEAST
Tuscaloosa News
High school football this season will be covered in a 16-page, all-color tab every Saturday.
The sports department worked with the advertising department to have strip ads throughout the section as well as ads on the inside covers and back cover. The product was sold out for the entire season by the end of August.
The regular sports section — which already was pretty slim on Saturdays to accommodate a Gameday section with the University of Alabama coverage — now has a deadline of 8:30 p.m. The sports department has made arrangements for major late events — such as the World Series — to be included in the A section.
The first edition of the high school football weekly coverage tab was a big hit with the readers, based on the feedback sports editor Tommy Deas received. The first section included coverage of 10 games, which is three or four more than usual, and photographs from 11 games to include with the roundup of calls.
“The 16-page color section not only enhances our high school football coverage,” Deas said, “it also proved to be a nice vehicle to monetize our product — we had three tab-sized full-page ads and strip ads on nearly every other page in the section, and all of those were sold for the entire season.”
The sports staff also made deadline on the first night, even though many games were delayed by the weather.
