The Dallas Morning News had been working more than two years, led by Deputy Sports Editor Mark Konradi, on its coverage plan for the Super Bowl.
That plan had one person covering the weather.
By the end of a Super Bowl week that including a Texas-sized snow and ice storm, weather stories dominated interest, website hits and coverage.
That's why a good plan for a big event is necessary, but so is flexibility when things change, Morning News Deputy Sports Editor Keith Campbell said at the APSE Southwest Region Meeting.
When the Texas Rangers made the World Series last fall, the Morning News had to set some of its Super Bowl planning aside to fully cover that big event. But the paper was still able to meet its goals, produce a glossy preview magazine, and fully cover NFL's biggest event when it came to town.
The original gameday plan included one story focused on "What did the fans think of the stadium and their experience?" That story ended up being as important as any other.
When a reporter, walking the stadium hours before the game, caught word of fans being removed from a temporary seating area in Cowboys Stadium, Konradi sent a message out to the entire Super Bowl coverage team that put a plan into place that sent several reporters and a photographer to the area of concern along with others heading to contact Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and league officials to stay on top of the story in real-time.
"You have to organize, accessorize and prioritize" Houston Chronicle Online Sports Editor Nick Mathews said.
In his first three weeks on the job, Mathews helped lead a group of reporters through a Final Four weekend where online was as much a focus as the Chronicle's print product.
Chronicle high school sports editor Michael Peters, who is now sports editor at the Tulsa World, directed the overall coverage.
Both the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle started their big even weeks with a glossy special section and continued to produce extra sections while borrowing reporters and resources from anywhere they could find them to bolster the coverage.
Dallas hired four temporary employees and used an army of news reporters while Houston used reporters from Hearst newspapers in San Antonio and Beaumont.
"You just want to bombard people," Mathews said.
Big event coverage doesn't have to be national though, it's simply what is important to your readers, explained San Angelo Standard-Times Sports Editor Nathan Wright.
His team produced a special section leading into the annual San Angelo Stock Show and Rodeo, along with creating an event-specific website where readers could find all of the event-related content (www.gosanangelo.com/news/rodeo/) much like Houston (www.chron.com/finalfour) and Dallas (www.dallasnews.com/superbowl).
The event brought between 10,000 and 15,000 people to San Angelo over its two weeks.
