National Sports Journalism Center

Over the weekend I spoke about sports coverage at the New York Press Association’s annual convention. Most of the attendees were representing weekly papers, which threw me a bit at first. But then I remembered that these days “weekly” is a description that only applies to print. A paper with an online presence isn’t a weekly any more than the New York Times is a daily or the Atlantic is a monthly. Any newspaper can now be a real-time news organization.

That said, this capability hasn’t exactly arrived with an accompaniment of overflowing coffers — to the contrary, alas. So I asked myself this question: In an era of limited resources, how can small weekly papers leverage cheap, existing technology to cover more sporting events more quickly?

Here are four ideas I explored:

* Extend coverage “up” through curation. The weekly sports sections I paged through at the NYPA convention mostly covered high schools and small colleges – whose athletic events are central to their communities. But their audiences are interested in more than that. Why not extend coverage “up” to bigger colleges and professional sports? This can be done relatively cheaply. Someone on-staff is probably already knowledgeable and passionate about college hoops, the NFL or baseball, and already reading a great deal of sports news about his or her favorite teams. Thanks to the Web, it’s easy to turn that passion and knowledge into content.

Linking is free – combine it with a written narrative and you’ve got coverage by curation, which I explored further in this column. For small papers, the great thing about curation is it lets them leverage the reporting and writing efforts of much bigger news organizations, effectively covering a much larger swath of sports for little more than the cost of the staff time to write an article. And perhaps not even that – someone on staff might well see the chance to add bylines about pro sports to their resume as a fair trade for a bit of their free time.

* Extend coverage “down” through pro-am efforts. Not everyone is a high-school varsity athlete in a marquee sport – many readers have children who compete in other high-school sports, are on the junior varsity, or play Little League baseball or youth soccer. And parents, for their part, may compete with friends in bowling leagues or play semi-pro softball. These athletic competitions may not seem as newsworthy, but they’re of intense interest to readers – and accounts of them are the kind of “refrigerator journalism” that’s prized by readers for years. The problem is that extending coverage “down” can’t be done through curation. It’s much more labor-intensive, and so demands a different answer.

One potential answer is the “pro-am” model – mixing professional journalism with reports put together by amateurs. This is a digital-age variation on stringers, only papers use Web tools to turn the entire community into potential stringers.

The pro-am model is a great fit for local sports. A weekly paper might despair of finding a reader who could cover the water board knowledgably and fairly, but that same paper has many readers who know about sports, are passionate about them, and are already attending games. Some of those people would probably be willing to send in brief narratives about those games, and able to file something usable with minimal coaching. And today posting photos and video is even easier than filing a brief story.

Papers don’t even have to host the photos or video themselves – rather, they can have uploaders identify them with some variation of the paper’s name on Flickr or YouTube or some other hosting service, and either link to them or feed them into the news site. And if they find the right people, they probably don’t have to pay them: People will do a lot for a little recognition, or just for the love of it. If I’d told you 15 years ago that volunteers would collectively create an enormous encyclopedia about everything from Spider-Man to the medieval papacy, you’d have called me a lunatic. But many of us now use Wikipedia everyday. Not every paper’s community contains a Spider-Man fanatic or a papal expert, but most every community includes someone who cares deeply about boys track.

(An alternate method of unlocking pro-am’s potential is to look at one of the many Web services that “crowd-source” such coverage, providing simple Web templates for scores and game narratives that can be filled in by coaches, team managers or parents. Such services have an up-front cost, and typically strike revenue-sharing deals with news organizations that use them. Because they standardize inputs and take care of much of the publishing process, they can let papers handle much more information than a small editorial staff could.)

Papers shouldn’t limit their pro-am thinking to scores and game stories. The kid who somehow manages three high-school teams might be an interesting blogger or columnist. (It’s already obvious that he’s organized!) Ditto for a parent of a local high-school athlete who’s likely to be recruited, or a retired coach.

* Try real-time coverage. Updating pro-sports scores or developments in real-time doesn’t particularly make sense, as most readers are watching the game anyway – this is why the best beat reporters instead offer a mix of in-game news and analysis on live blogs or Twitter. But high-school sports is different – such games aren’t televised, and people may be keenly interested but unable to attend. Real-time coverage can be done by staffers or members of the community from the sidelines, with tweets fed automatically onto a sports page and photos and video uploaded minutes after they’re shot.

Make some money! These efforts are great for growing readership and building audience loyalty. But they also might make papers some money. Some small papers have built side businesses by posting photos from games and other local events and allowing people to purchase prints. (See, for instance, what the Pocono Record has done. Or, after it runs online, “reverse-publishing” this material in print might unlock new ad opportunities. Papers might be able to sell ads against a weekly “best of the blogs” feature, or use Web material to put together a robust season-in-review supplement about a winning team.

Most Web-publishing tools are either free or very cheap. They allow organizations big and small to take in material from not just staffers but readers in close to real-time, often with equipment that’s no more specialized than the cellphone that’s already in someone’s pocket. All of these efforts will take work, and none of them is guaranteed to succeed. But it’s never been quicker or easier to experiment with them.

Are there weekly newspapers that are covering sports in particularly innovative ways online? Please let me know in the comments or via email. And thanks to everyone who attended my session exploring this topic at the NYPA convention!

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.