People came from all across the south for the annual Southeast cialis online pharmacy Region meeting, held April 26 generic cialis 5 mg in Birmingham, Ala.
After region chairman Jon Johnson of the Dothan Eagle welcomed the crowd of approximately 30 attendees to the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, he turned it over to an ambitious agenda.
Facebook and Twitter in sports:
Tim Stephens of the Orlando Sentinel provided the audience with ideas to help their respective sports sections help themselves through the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media devices.
“The internet is forcing us to evolve,” Stephens said. “Now using social media we have to start believing that a 140 character tweet is storytelling, too.”
Stephens encouraged everyone to start thinking of the sports section as a two-way street to communicate with our readers and to start listening to what they say. By doing that you can feed the readership the information they need about what they are talking about, not what we think they are talking about.
By interacting with the audience on a consistent basis, writers are able to start to build themselves as a brand, one the readers will follow and seek out for the information they provide from their beat.
By doing these things, social media will help with:
Better writing – you have to write tight when you only have 140 characters to tell your story, increasing online traffic, generating user content and identifying breaking news and hot topics.
Column writing – connecting with the reader:
Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham News and Tommy Hicks of the Mobile Press Register tag-teamed an hour-long seminar on how to better use the column – not just for opinion, but to break news – in an effort to connect with the reader.
Scarbinsky fired first.
“We are still reporters,” he said. “If a column isn’t based on good reporting what good is it?”
Both men reiterated the necessity to know who you are writing for. As much as we might like to do columns on Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger or Brett Favre, do they really serve your readership? With the current status of our industry, no one should know our backyard like us. Focus locally and give the readers what they want.
“Local is where it’s at now,” Hicks said.
Most of all, be honest with your readers. Don’t write what you think they want to hear. Be honest with your opin-ions and truly believe in what you are writing, which will help your personality come through. If you don’t believe what you are writing about, the reader will be able to tell.
Above all else, communicate with the rest of the staff. Communication with the editors and beat writers will help keep the harmony within the section. By having good communication you may be able to help them or they may be able to point you in the proper direction to find the information you are looking for. When it comes right down to the end, it is not as important which byline is on the story as it is to get the necessary information to your readers.
Q&A with Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive and associate commissioner Charles Bloom:
While the original intent of the session was to pepper Slive and Bloom with whatever questions came to mind, Commissioner Slive turned the tables briefly by asking what the SEC office could do to help sports editors and writers better serve the readers.
The overwhelming answer was the need for better access with the players and coaches — including the coordinators —during the week.
Members in the room pointed out that little things that may have been two sentences in a notebook 15 or 20 years ago, or completely left out, now becomes a big story because it is the only thing that particular writer may get out of an interview because the atmosphere has become so guarded and sterile.
To help alleviate the situation it was suggested the athletic directors actually allow the sports information direc-tors they hired do the job they were hired for – dealing with the media – as opposed to being a figurehead for the football coach.
Bloom pointed out that in most situations, it is not the beat writer from the hometown paper that the coach was worried about, rather the bloggers and all other people putting information out on the web not affiliated with a reputable news organization.
To maybe start on the way to fixing the problem, Bloom and Slive agreed to talk with SID’s about the possibility of a credential that identifies those that would be considered traditional print media.
It was also suggested that the SID’s deal more with the media on a one-on-one basis rather than trying to orchestrate to the masses.
Other items discussed:
Having better meeting space for post-game press conferences with players and coaches of visiting teams.
Talk about SEC football scheduling and how the conference will now not allow a school to play more than three or four teams a year that are coming off a bye week the week prior to their contest. This is in reference to the University of Alabama having six such games this coming season.
And Slive read a prepared statement saying that the SEC will not allow its status of being the premier athletic conference threatened by the possibility of other conferences expansion plans. While “comfortable” right now with its size, Slive said the conference will take action if necessary.
Breaking news:
Phil Kaplan of the Knoxville News Sentinel spoke on the night Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin resigned.
The news of Lane Kiffin resigning from the University of Tennessee was learned at 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 12, and Kaplan went through the different ways he and his staff were able to provide the best possible coverage of the breaking news and still get the paper out in a timely fashion and keep all the Volunteer fans in the information loop with constant updates on the web.
Kaplan immediately began contacting staff members to help with the coverage and while beat writers were sent to campus for the 9:30 scheduled press conferences, other staff members began getting reaction around campus, preparing time lines, and an early potential list of replacements to fill the coaching job.
In all, there were six or seven members on the ground. While some got to the actual press conferences, others were investigating the reports of student riots and bonfires.
At each step of the operation, Kaplan sent out constant updates on Twitter and kept the web site updated. Twitter turned out to be the best option as when the news started to reach the masses, the News-Sentinel servers crashed.
The staff supplemented the eventual five stories in the paper with audio and video from the press conference and around campus and photo galleries.
By staying with the story in the days to follow, the staff was able to get the only one-on-one interview with Kiffin before he left for USC, got pictures of staff members removing assistant coach Ed Orgeron’s Red Bull refrigerator and of the plane as the former staff boarded and headed to California.
