Newspaper Coverage

Several of you here emailed me today to ask that I come here and answer some questions regarding coverage. I'm here. I'll try my best.

 

Hey Langston--I'll ask a question later, but I want to welcome you back to the board. Good of you to visit

 

thanks, man. i'll be around.

 

LW--with the season winding down and teams getting ready for conference tournaments, what are your plans for future stories?

...and can you tell us what you have been up to lately?

 

Langston,

We appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions....

What determines or dictates the schools, players etc you cover or write about?

 

If they play basketball.

Just kidding, LW. You know I had to get that time worn dig in

 

First Tee

Langston,

Great article in the paper about the First Tee junior golf program. Hope it's successful. Maybe they could make an exception to the age rule and invite some of the local coaches to the session where they talk about sportsmanship.

 

Langston, do you think you guys could bring back the sweet 16? you maybe could get andy partin and some of the guys from this board to help you?

 

Well we split coverage into sports and certain people are responsible for certain sports. For the past three years, in spring, I've had softball, golf and girls soccer. Brett Honeycutt gets track and Cliff Merhtens handles tennis and baseball.

My plans are to cover the sports I'm assigned to, hard, and find some great human interest stories. I know I talk about them all the time, but its' the best way to get coverage. In a paper our size, we have to try to hit the broadest swath of readers. I can tell you that baseball is no longer one of the Big 3 sports, at least in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Ticket sales tell us that football and basketball are still king, but baseball would now be lumped in with volleyball and in some cases soccer.

The interest is not there as much with other sports. That's why we don't cover it more. We have covered it some and at this time of year, I think we should ramp it up and I think you'll see it ramped up. I'm just not sure how many people in our readership care about a regular season midweek game between Olympic and Providence.

But if I can tell a tale about a former major league player's grandson who pitches, well, a broader swath of readers might be interested.

It's interesting (and I know I'm not really answering your question) how often this happens. I'll write a story about Player X, and then parent/coach/teacher/principal of Player Y calls and yells at me because they think Player Y is a better player and has a better story. How would I know? I ask all the time for story ideas and you all ask all the time about coverage.

We are not going to be covering prep baseball like the smaller papers I see you guys mention on here. Yes, I think we can do better and perhaps I'll lobby to get back on the baseball beat next year, but bottom line is we can do some really good feature stories on players from charlotte, Hickory, Lincolnton, anywhere in our coverage area. Just help me find them ([email protected]).

What's a good human interest story? Look at what we write about; girl at Central Cabarrus fighting cancer and still playing; MLB All-Star's grandson playing in Charlotte; WBTV's Football Friday night tradition. I want stories that are unusual. Everyone has a .400 hitter with 10 home runs. Everyone doesn't have an .800 hitter with 40. And stories don't have to be about players. It could be about a principal, a fan, a concession stand worker who's done it for 30 years and who's son is the star of the same high school where the consession stand worker was a star once.

Think out of the box and let me know your ideas.

As to where I've been? Took some time off after basketball playoffs, then came back to work, working on golf stories and prep stories and making sure we had folks at the right stories for the sports I cover.

 

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