By MIKE SHERMAN
The Oklahoman

	WORKSHOP

Is the game story dead? Are you crazy?

TV ratings for many sporting events are in decline.

Major league baseball games approach three hours in length.

More and more televised events are ending after midnight on the East Coast.

So would someone please explain why anyone would think the game story is dead?

Bill Eichenberger, sports editor at Newsday and former APSE president, says he's been hearing for years that gamers are a thing of the past, that readers already know the outcome when they pick up the paper.

"That doesn't acknowledge the reality of the life our readers live," he said during the APSE session entitled "How Sports Sections Can Adjust to a Changing Environment."

"How many people have three hours to watch a Yankee game? Even the diehard fans are looking for how the game was won and lost."

Baltimore Sun sports editor Randy Harvey said the question is how game stories can be relevant the next morning.

"But on the East Coast, where games are getting over at 12:30 p.m., there's a good chance our that for many of our readers this will be the first detailed knowledge they're getting," Harvey said.

If game stories indeed are dead, Eichenberger knows who killed them. Sports editors are burying them beneath stories built on "inane comments from players and overquoting."

"I think we're devaluing the franchise," he said. "We're playing these stories on page 6. The implicit message is this really isn't important stuff.

"I love to read a story that gives me insight into a game that I didn't have time to watch."

Eichenberger called game stories the bread-and-butter of what we do.

"Well-done accounts of games have great value for us," he said. "We can describe it in a way that cements it readers' minds."

How far do you go in the quest to attract new readers?

Sports editors no longer dare to be different.

For many of us, it's practically written into our job descriptions.

By a show of hands, more than half of the editors indicated that their newspaper chain or bosses talk to them about the need to do things differently to attract new readers.

David Manning / David Manning Photography Bill Eichenberger of Newsday, left, and Randy Harvey of the Baltimore Sun both agree that game stories remain an integral part of sports sections.

What's different?

"Depends on your market, your philosophy and a whole lot of other things," said moderator Greg Brownell, sports editor of the Glens Falls (N.Y.) Post-Star, who offered a cautionary tale about how far you should go to be different.

The editor on duty for the Post-Star is required to look for something unusual each day to put in the paper, something outside the mainstream. A column. An outdoors story. Something that might attract readers who don't traditionally read the sports section.

Brownell had been off for three days when looked at the cover of his section to find what he described as "a picture of pigs pushing a ball around in the street."

Actually, the photo showed two teams of pigs in yellow and green jerseys scrambling for a soccer ball covered with mashed carrots.

Post-Star readers weren't particularly interested in this annual event in Moscow.

Brownell said his email inbox filled up, including this rant from a Post-Star cops reporter:

"The highest paid team in baseball is collapsing, Pedro throws a two-hitter and you guys put pigball on the sports front. Who's steering the ship back there."

"We'll still do this once in a while," Brownell said of his dare-to-be-different decree, "but no pigs, please."

Other thoughts

• Space, staffing and resources are changing, but one constant is the need to break news, Eichenberger said. "All we talk about is enterprise, special sections and we don't talk about breaking news."

• Is going local — at the expense of everything else — loco? Brownell: "Do we really want to deny what is important to our readers just because we haven't been there to cover it?" Eichenberger: "Have your own plan. Things we've done for ego reasons, we can't afford to do anymore. We have to do it because it's right journalistically."

• Eichenberger on the space, staff and other resource challenges facing sports editors: "You have to look at this as a great opportunity to redefine sports sections. If you don't, you're just wallowing in misery."

• Want a sure-fire way to surprise and attract different readers? Hire a diverse staff. "Build a staff diverse in age and ethnicity and you will do it naturally," Eichenberger said. "All the self-conscious efforts to do that, people see through them."

 Back to index