Sports coverage
What's happening Around the Web
One of our functions here at the Center is to be "surrogate readers" for Texas community journalists. Keeping up with the fast-changing world of community journalism has never been harder, and community journalism is now the "hot" area in mass communications.
But you have a paper to put out, and a Website to maintain. A few of you may even have a life.
So we'll help you keep up with what folk around the nation are saying about our field — about community journalism specifically and the wider world of newspapers and news Websites in general.
January 14, 2010
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Meet your new sportswriter
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.”
June 23, 2009
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How to improve sports coverage with online tools
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.
June 4, 2009
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New high school sports site shows the possibilities for prep sports on the Net
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.
