High school sports, once considered a part of daily local newspaper coverage that no Web site could match, is now under increasing competition from national entities that used to focus on colleges and the pros.
That means local papers have felt the pressure to increase their online high school presence, a challenge that was the subject during a “Pumping Up Your Preps” session at this month’s APSE Mid-Atlantic regional at Penn State.
The panel was led by Josh Barnett, the executive sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, and included Stan Wischnowski, deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer; Kathy Schwartz, general manager of Times-Shamrock Interactive, based in Scranton, Pa.; Judy Connelly, who just left her sports editor’s post at the Scranton Times for the same job at the Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record; and Tom Bergeron, former sports editor at the Newark Star-Ledger who is now a senior editor of RivalsHigh at www.highschool.rivals.com.
Bergeron jokingly opened his remarks by referring to himself as the “big, bad wolf here to steal all your stories.” He said that while Rivals has been known for liberally taking material from newspapers, the focus now is on original reporting.
Bergeron said his new Web site, an offshoot of Yahoo! and Rivals, was designed to cover some of the lower-profile players and teams beyond the blue-chip recruits and state champs. He hoped the site could become a resource, or even a partner, for newspapers looking to boost their online high school coverage, particularly with enterprise stories and statistics.
He also stressed the power of Rivals and Yahoo! links, noting how Yahoo highlighting a TV station’s video lifted that site’s hit total from 2,000 to 750,000.
Wischnowski said Rally, a joint venture of the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News (available at www.philly.com/rally) has quickly risen to No. 3 in sports behind the Eagles and Phillies for page views in its 100 days online.
The former high school site was mostly a score and schedule database, but the new site includes features, galleries, polls and blogs in addition to the scores and schedules for 320 schools in eight counties over two states. The site will also publish enterprise work before it appears in the newspaper. This has all been done despite the Inquirer newsroom shrinking by 50 percent since 2005. Wischnowski said that because of the massive number of schools, the site uses somewhat of a tier system that focuses mainly on 50-60 of the schools.
“If we write a story and it only appears in one of our two papers, then we didn’t maximize its potential,” he said.
Wischnowski said the scoreboards helped create “stickiness,” which was time spent on the site and something advertisers wanted.
Schwartz and Connelly were behind Varsity570 at www.varsity570.com as part of the Scranton Times Web site. The name is the area code in Northeast Pennsylvania, stemming from a former regional entertainment product. The site also covers schools in the parent company’s six regional papers. One advantage to the setup is reporters enter postgame data in one place that generates a box score and an online package for each player.
“We have 15,000 kids on there,” Schwartz said. “It’s a huge undertaking, but it’s seen as an extension of our papers serving their communities.”
