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Around the Web links about Sports coverage

  • Shared by Tommy Thomason 2 years 2 weeks ago

    Northwestern University has produced a sportswriter they hope will be hired at community papers throughout the United States.  Not a new graduate who wants to work in community journalism – a piece of software.  The Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern calls their new sportswriter StatsMonkey, and they think he’s perfect for community papers covering Little League games.  The co-director of the lab says that StatsMonkey is designed “to write the stories no one else is writing.”  The program takes the stats of the game and produces a sports story on the game.  Click on the link above to hear NPR’s story about the new software, plus an example of the type of stories the software can “write.”


  • Shared by Andrew Chavez 2 years 32 weeks ago

    10,000 Words has a cool roundup of several ways to adapt online sports coverage to better fit the Internet. While the sports story clearly still has a place, they have some good suggestions for some value-added features, many of which we've discussed in workshops, such as maps and stats features.


  • Shared by Tommy Thomason 2 years 34 weeks ago

    The NAA reported this week that the Dallas Morning News’ high school sports Website, HS GameTime, now averages nearly 2 million pageviews a month. Visit the site and look at it as a treasure trove of ideas for what you could be doing for the high schools in your readership area. Football season is just around the corner, and now is a great time to tool up a Website that can draw all kinds of fan interest – and advertising dollars. GameTime generates so much traffic because it offers what no newspaper has the news hole to do – stats, scores and schedules, standings, rankings, videos, slide shows, and the like. Plus, they let readers submit photos and videos of their teams. To that, you should add videos of your band at halftime, cheerleaders doing their routines, and photos and videos of what’s happening in the stands and on the bench during the games – all the off-action stuff that we never have room for in the paper but people love to see.

    Who’s the audience for this type of coverage? Athletes and their parents, band members and their parents, cheerleaders and their parents, other family and friends, local sports fans, high school kids who’d never even think of picking up your paper, and so on. Build this site, and they will come. And when they come, advertisers will, too.