Salt Lake Tribune assistant sports editor Danyelle White said she was originally a "Twitter hater," but she has reformed.
Twitter has become a powerful tool in prep coverage for the Tribune under White's direction. White and Jeff Parenti, assistant sports editor of the Riverside Press-Enterprise, addressed "Preps for the web and beyond" at Monday's Associated Press Sports Editors West Region meeting in Reno. White's portion dealt with the use of Twitter in prep sports coverage and Parenti discussed his paper's innovative video coverage.
Faced with shrinking or limited resources, White turned to Twitter to serve the needs of her prep audience.
"I really didn't know what to do with it," White said. "But I decided to work with it and it's all been trial and error."
White's presentation showed how the Tribune keeps its audience informed during Friday night football games and throughout the week through Twitter and live blogs. Reasons to tweet included reader appreciation, reader participation, mobile phone interaction, expanding coverage and relationship with your "tweeps." Pitfalls to avoid include saturation point, loss of followers, questionable sources and appropriateness of the tweets.
"A lot of people think of Twitter as being a fad, but I think it's helped me and my coverage," White said. "It has set us apart from our competitors. What we can offer is what they don't. They don't do live blogs and they don't tweet live scores."
Parenti and his staff are producing a large amount of video in concert with the "High School Game Time" website at the Press Enterprise. The site also includes separate team pages, photos, statistics and student blogs. The Press Enterprise produces the only local live prep football sports show on Friday nights. The show, which is hosted by two staff members, is sponsored by a local car dealership.
So why does Parenti devote so much of his resources to this endeavor?
"I think it's the most important thing we do locally," Parenti said. "We have a pretty diverse community with our coverage. We can reach all of those areas in one night with what we do."
The amount of traffic has been impressive, as well. In the first eight weeks of the 2010 season the site produced 2.145 million page views, a 22 percent increase over 2009. Video views are up 500 percent.
Each Friday night the Press Enterprise sends five writers, four photographers and eight videographers out to cover the area's football games. A video production staff mans the phones and the live show later than night.
Parenti said even newspapers with limited resources can find a way to utilize video on their website.
Jeff Parenti — Preps for the web and Beyond from IU Journalism on Vimeo.
"Start simply with a web cam, then sign up with U-Stream," Parenti said. "Just go from there. Look at what YouTube is doing with its amateur videos. People live on YouTube."
NOTE: You can download Jeff Parenti's presentation on high school sports here.
