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Region reports
Compiled by FRED M. FAOUR
The Times-News in Hendersonville, N.C., has launched an ambitious summer project to round up once and for all as many records as it can from the eight high schools in its coverage area. One school has been open since at least 1915, but few accounts of team and individual athletic performances seem to be available. The T-N sports staff will spend the next month acquiring as much information as it can from the schools themselves before contacting former coaches and players and ultimately focusing on microfilm to glean as much as possible from old editions of the newspaper itself. The goal is to become the community's unquestioned source for this kind of information.
The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's first venture into online digital video was built around Justin Upton, a high school baseball player who went first in this year's free-agent draft. Pilot digital video producer Roger Richards developed a pair of digital video reports, the first of which featured Upton in action and speaking of his hopes for the future. The second video report chronicled draft day as he waited anxiously with family and friends at Great Bridge High before learning Arizona had taken him as the No. 1 overall pick. The DV offering was paired with a profile of Upton that ran on A1 in the Sunday paper and a live A1 draft story that ran the day after he was selected (two of the first four players selected were players from the Virginian-Pilot's circulation area. The story and video got great response from readers and marked a significant departure for the Virginian-Pilot in how the paper reports its stories. The Fayetteville Observer sports staff produced a 48-page tabloid previewing the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. The highlight was a readers' poll that voted on eight categories of greatest moments in U.S. Open history. During the tournament, the sports and news staff produced a 14-page special section each day that wrapped the entire newspaper. The Hilton Head Island Packet is in the midst of a redesign of its Web site, and the sports department has been at the fore of several new features that are already up and running. Recently added to the site were links to video clips of sporting events the staff covers, as well as photo galleries that include staff pictures not published in the Packet's print version. Sports editor Jeff Kidd launched a blog, joining editorial page editor David Lauderdale as the first Packet writers to do so, and the Packet's site enables registered users to start their own blogs. Also, the recreation area of the Web site was revamped to include an easy way for recreation league coaches and scorekeepers to submit game results and for organizers to submit information about their events for publication in the Packet's semi-weekly recreation page. Several other new features are on the way. — Ron Wagner
A Vancouver Province project to keep readers' interest through the dog days of August has proved much more popular than anticipated. It's a series on the province's top 10 sports towns. Readers were invited to submit an argument for why their town should be on the list. A huge amount of information came in, including countless great story ideas that could be tackled in the future. The editors have now chosen a top 10, and community profiles are being researched and written. Each town in the top 10 will get a two-page spread in August when the countdown to No. 1 begins. The work is being done by Terry Bell, who was recently runner-up at the National Newspaper Awards for his January 2004 series on the NHL's labor troubles. That series anticipated much of what eventually transpired during the NHL lockout. The Toronto Sun produced a 72-page special section in advance of the Toronto Grand Prix Champ Car race, the focus being on the 20th anniversary of the race. The section was well supported with ads and was inserted into the Thursday paper before the weekend race. — Pat Grier
The Great Lakes Region will host two region meetings in the fall in different geographic sections to allow an opportunity for more people to attend one or both. One will be held Monday, Nov. 14, in Indianapolis, and the other will be in Minneapolis the first week of November. The exact date, times, cost and programs for both region meetings will be announced on the APSE Website, in a later newsletter and also e-mailed to APSE members and non-APSE members throughout the region. — Brad Zimanek
Ron Fritz of the Wilmington News Journal is the new region chair, taking over for Jim Jenks, who was elected APSE's first vice president. Jason Carris of the Vineland (N.J.) Daily Journal is the new vice chairman. Plans are in the works for a region meeting at State College, Pa., on Dec. 4-5. The meeting will take place in conjunction with the Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State University and will involve students in the meeting. Details should be finalized in the next month or so. The program will once again include a critique session as well as a lunch speaker. At last year's region meeting in Atlantic City, we had 22 participants. The goal is to top that in December with more participation from the larger papers. Ideas for speakers and discussion panels should be sent to Ron Fritz at rfritz@delawareonline.com. — Jim Jenks
The Citizen (Auburn, N.Y.) published its annual minor-league baseball preview for its New York-Penn League team, the Doubledays, in June. The Citizen also launched a weekly local outdoors page to go along its local bowling, recreation and golf pages. — Chris Sciria
The Northwest Region has a new chairman and several members committed to restoring a regional program. Early talks involve creating two regional meetings in the next 12 months, with the most likely destinations being Seattle and Portland. Stay tuned. Ron Matthews is the new Northwest Region chair. If you have notes or information you would like to include in this report, e-mail them to Ron at ronmatthews@seattlepi.com. The biggest news in the region comes from The Oregonian. Mark Hester has moved from business editor to sports editor. "After more than 20 years of reporting and editing business, nine of them here, I was ready for a change," Hester wrote in an e-mail to friends and colleagues. "As most of you know, I'm big a sports fan, and I think sports journalism is at an important crossroads — making this an exciting challenge. Plus I get a bigger staff and that big (but shrinking) travel budget that business editors everywhere envy." On June 17, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer hosted an All-Star night at Safeco Field for high school athletes and their families. More than 130 athletes and their mothers, fathers and guests attended the event that featured a buffet dinner, brief awards ceremony and admission to the Mariners-Mets series opener. And, as scripted, Ichiro Suzuki hit a three-run homer near the section where the 400 or so guests were seated. — Ron Matthews
The Orlando Sentinel spent several months on what makes the rubber hit the road, following the life of a NASCAR tire from the production plant in Akron, Ohio to the left-front side of Rusty Wallace's car in the Brooklyn 500 in Michigan. The Sentinel was given exclusive access to several areas of Goodyear's production facility and allowed to photograph and document the path of a specific tire. This project ran across a full doubletruck and jumped to an accompanying page. It also included photographs from the tire's entire 40-plus day life span and an info-graphic on how the tire was put together and used. Memphis has one of the top rising senior prep basketball players in the country, Thaddeus Young. And as is the case so often these days, he is surrounded by many "looking out for his welfare." The Commercial Appeal wanted to tell the readers what that's like. Instead of doing a long story detailing the entourage, reporter Jim Masilak wrote a short story on the player, and in a doubletruck inside, wrote vignettes on the various members of the surrounding cast. It opened the eyes of many readers who didn't realize that this kind of thing happened, and received several favorable comments. The most entertaining thing about fishing is the fish stories. So the Florida Times-Union asked readers to submit their best personal fish story. The stories had to be (mostly) true, and verified by outdoors writer Joe Julavits. Response was outstanding, and the Times-Union picked and published the best five, along with three honorable mentions that were too good to throw back. The package ran as a Sunday centerpiece the Sunday before the Greater Jacksonville Kingfish Tournament. The Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald produced a package examining the decreasing number of blacks playing baseball at the high school level. It found that of the 374 players on varsity rosters in the area, only 20 were black. The package included a sidebar examining numbers in area Little Leagues and with the University of Georgia baseball team. The Tallahassee Democrat took third in the daily section general excellence category of the Florida Sports Writers Association and executive sports editor Randy Beard took third place in event coverage for a story on a December autograph session by O.J. Simpson that drew only about two dozen people to a small club in Quincy, Fla. Tallahassee sports bars refused to host the event and a protest by a local women's shelter resulted in limited radio promotion. The Knoxville News Sentinel received four first-place individual awards from the Tennessee Sports Writers Association. John Adams was named best columnist; Mike Strange best event writer; Bob Hodge best outdoor writer and Roland Julian best headline writer. Second-place awards went to Mike Griffith for best investigative, enterprise or series, Gary Lundy for column writing and Dan Fleser in the headline category. Ron Higgins of the Commercial Appeal was named Writer of the Year. Beginning this year, the Writer of the Year in all three divisions was named to honor Lundy, the former News Sentinel sports writer who died last fall. Lundy was one of the charter members of the Tennessee Sports Writers Association when the organization was created in 1987.
The Denton Record-Chronicle is spending part of its summer working on a local steroids project. "Body and Mind" is a four-part series by the paper on the effects steroids have on the youth of today. The Beaumont Enterprise is involved in a seven-week summer series, "Sport or Not." Writer Johnnie Walters is featuring a different activity each week and making the case for why it is and isn't a sport. Each story is accompanied by an online poll, and more than 1,500 readers voted during the first three weeks. The activities have ranged from cheerleading to fishing. Walters also won a pair of third-place awards during the May Hearst Honors contest, a monthly competition among the six Hearst metro newspapers. Her coverage of Southeast Texas track earned her recognition in the beat reporting category, while she teamed with photographer Scott Eslinger and page designer Seames O'Grady to finish third in graphic design for a project called "Built for Speed," the building of the perfect sprinter. The Austin American-Statesman put out its annual preview section for the Tour de France on July 1. This year's theme was a retrospective of Lance Armstrong's career, including a look at how other famous athletes said goodbye when they retired, a six-column graphic breaking down the number of minutes Armstrong trailed or led in each stage of the Tour from 1999 through 2004, a "Tour de France for Dummies" page, and a tongue-in-cheek look at how different the sports world would have turned out if Armstrong had not decided to come back to racing after his battle with cancer. The Statesman also produced a four-page wrap celebrating the University of Texas' national championship in baseball. — Michael Peters
The West Region elected Bill Bradley of the Sacramento Bee to be vice chair. Bradley replaces Gerry Ahern, who left the Orange County Register to become deputy sports editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Dave Morgan became West chair at the conclusion of the APSE national convention in Orlando. The San Jose Mercury News launched a new Bay Area golf column on June 30. Written by Eric Pinkela, who's also a designer on the sports desk, the column tracks notable Bay Area pros and provides news from courses around the area. The Salt Lake Tribune launched two new weekly pages, Golf Insider, and MLB Insider. The latter is written by the paper's new national baseball writer, Phil Miller. Miller is hitting one to two major-league cities a week as the paper looks to dramatically increase its coverage of major-league baseball, focusing on the weekly page, features, takeouts and trend stories. The paper also revamped its entire daily MLB presentation. ... The Tribune advanced the debut of Real Salt Lake, a Major League Soccer expansion franchise, with a special section. Interestingly, MLS officials told The Tribune, which has a traveling beat writer, that it was the first special section on its league since its first season 10 years ago. April 24 was an interesting day. The Salt Lake Marathon, a huge local event, took place on the same day as the NFL Draft and Utah's Alex Smith's selection as the No. 1 pick. So, the marathon was handled with an 8-page stand-alone section. Gordon Monson was honored by the Utah Press Association was the state's top columnist for 2004. Reporter Michael C. Lewis was Utah's state honoree as sportswriter of the year by the National Sportswriters and Sportscaster Association. — Larry Ames |
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