Newspaper Coverage

Braves · May 2, 2005 at 5:41 PM

I wish you will have the time (or Mehrtens) to follow up on the heartfelt story going on at East Meck and their special field. It is inspirational!!!!

Let me know if you need more details

Braves · May 2, 2005 at 5:43 PM

Langston Wertz Jr. said:

When I started at The Observer in 1988, we had a Piedmont reporter (Chris Hobbs) and a Mecklenburg reporter (Mike Purkey). We tried to cover the Piedmont schools (AL Brown, Hickory, Richmond et al) about the same we did Charlotte schools. When I was hired, I was placed in the Gaston Observer (our Gastonia bureau) where I stayed 10 months before then executive sports editor Gary Schwab saw something (Lord knows what) in my writing and asked me to come over to what we call the "mainframe."

I started working with Purkey, who later took a job with a national Golf magazine. A few years later, Hobbs left, and I saw a unique opportunity, then having the longevity thing on my side, to go to the bosses and try to make changes.

I wanted to do an All-Observer team that ran in all editions instead of an All-Piedmont team and an All-Meck team and an All-Upper SC team zoned for their editions (so if you live in the Piedmont, you only saw the Piedmont team).

I thought people interested in high schools wanted to see beyond only their coverage area and that our big advantage over the smaller papers was to regionalize our coverage as much as possible. I never thought we could "win" by trying to out cover Alan Ford at the Shelby Star on Shelby or Crest coverage.

We bust our butts to cover Shelby one week and feel proud of ourselves and I would talk to Shelby fans about why they were only in the paper once or twice a year with game stories. We have 126 schools. Alan might have 5. We could only realistically cover Shelby once or twice a year, at least until playoffs.

I felt our push should be more towards big features. I wanted us to be more like a regional SI mag. We come to town and shine the big light on your stars. We've slowly moved towards that, and it's interesting because we don't hear as many complaints about coverage because we have been able to drop in some front page Piedmont features throughout the past 36 months, which I think is better than an 8 paragaph game story on two of our 60 some odd Piedmont teams on page 8.

Now in Charlotte, we are the hometown newspaper, and I never thought we did enough. I pushed too hard there, I have to admit, creating all manner of awards and all-star teams. I did a twice a week mini-section in the Mecklenburg Neighbors (an insert available to home subscribers in Meck County) and we used to do 16-page preview sections in Meck Nabors that absolutely caused tons of headaches for our desk people because of the volume of work and the short period with which it would come in.

I also pushed to start naming all-star teams in all sports, not just basketball and football, as was the case when I started. We tried Sweet 16s in all sports, but it's so tough beyond football and basketball to get updated records for all the teams you're considering. We had to back off because we were spending too many man hours chasing records instead of writing and reporting stories.

So, bottom line, some things worked and some didn't. But to answer your question about how we chose what to cover, well, we're not going to be covering a whole lot of non-football outside of Charlotte for reasons I've tried to explain. We can't win.

If you live in Salisbury, you want coverage of Salisbury. If you live in Monroe, you want coverage of Monroe. We simply couldn't get to all of those areas enough to satisfy you with daily coverage.

In Charlotte, we try to ID the big games and moments and cover those. When a team is playing for a conference title or two top 10 teams are playing or two big rivals with something at stake, etc. The games to cover here are pretty obvious most times. That said, I also like to cover nontraditional teams, at least early in the season, to give them some pop.

Human interest is big in Charlotte, too, because a good feature story is simply going to get better "play" than a run-of-the-mill game story
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Thanks LW...first time you have ever stated some of this before; like how you got started

Langston Wertz Jr. · May 2, 2005 at 8:34 PM

Braves said:

I wish you will have the time (or Mehrtens) to follow up on the heartfelt story going on at East Meck and their special field. It is inspirational!!!!

Let me know if you need more details
Click to expand...

Yes email me some details. Thanks.

Langston Wertz Jr. · May 2, 2005 at 8:36 PM

Braves said:

Thanks LW...first time you have ever stated some of this before; like how you got started
Click to expand...

To quote the Rev. James Jones, "those who forget history..."

Smiles.

PhillyDave · Mar 6, 2008 at 8:54 AM

Newspaper Coverage-- Merged

Why is it that the local newspaper here (Charlotte Observer) in Mecklenburg County refuses to cover HS Baseball. While Football and Basketball seem to get all the print, baseball gets none. Hell, we're lucky if we get the box scores on time. And when we do get the box scores, they are late or not correct! Example in todays paper, Providence HS had a game yesterday and Semeniuk went 2 for 2. Which Semeniuk, ...... Eric or Kurt? That's probably not the paper's fault, but dam, I would like to know. If it wasn't for this forum and all the info we get here, we wouldn't know what the heck is going on in our HS baseball world. Thanks to all that contribute!

One Putt · Mar 6, 2008 at 9:24 AM

Langston, I'm not in the Charlotte area but I thinks it's good you came here willing to answer questions.

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Newspaper Coverage

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