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Region reports
Compiled by FRED M. FAOUR
The Burlington (N.C.) Times-News published two special sections in conjunction with North Carolina's run to the national championship in NCAA men's basketball. The Times-News published an eight-page special section for the day of the Final Four semifinals. After the Tar Heels won the title, the sports section produced a 12-page commemorative edition with new material (aside from game recaps from the season). Considering this came less than a month after an annual ACC Tournament special section and just prior to a spring section on area golf, this was a sizeable additional workload — Ron Wagner
In Vancouver, The Province's experiment with a Sunday sports pullout has ended. As part of its November 2004 redesign, the tabloid moved its Sunday sports section from its traditional off-the-back position to a stand-alone pullout section to be read from front to back. The change garnered the expected calls from readers who didn't want to adapt, but those soon died down, and many readers came to appreciate being able to separate Sports from the rest of the paper. However, management decided in March that Sports was too difficult to locate inside the thick Sunday paper, and Sports has now returned to the back page. — Pat Grier
Illinois' short trip to the men's basketball Final Four — the Illini played in Indianapolis, Chicago and St. Louis — made life easier for The Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette, which was able to ship more than 5,000 papers to those cities each day of the NCAA Tournament. The regular sports section was wrapped by an 8- to 10-page section devoted to Illinois in the NCAAs. After the tournament, the News-Gazette produced two special sections: an 84-page Year in Review that consisted of color reproductions of the front pages of sports sections the day after each of Illinois' 39 games; other stories and stats; and a 36-page pictorial review. The News-Gazette, in conjunction with Sports Publishing, also produced a 128-page instant book, "One For The Ages," that was available at bookstores the Friday after the title game. The Chicago Tribune produced live 8-page wrapper sections of Illinois daily throughout the Final Four and following Illinois' title-game loss to North Carolina. The Chicago Tribune also did an 8-page wrap section for the NFL draft in late April. The Midland (Mich.) Daily News made state, national and international news April 26 when it was the subject of an anthrax hoax. Employees, including our sports brethren, were quarantined in the building for four hours, and 10 employees ended up having to go through decontamination while testing took place on the substance, which was delivered by mail to the MDN editor. Police are investigating the case. The Wisconsin Associated Press Sports Editors held their annual meeting May 5-6 in Madison. President and Wisconsin State Journal assistant sports editor Rob Hernandez presided over a meeting that included sessions on: "They want us to do what? Coping with changes in your newsroom" with Wausau Daily Herald managing editor Joel Christopher, La Crosse Tribune sports editor Jeff Brown and The Janesville Gazette sports editor Dave Wedeward; and "Sprucing up your agate page" with Chicago Tribune associate sports editor Lee Gordon. The meeting included dinner with guest speaker Rob Jeter, UW-Milwaukee's new basketball coach, and a tour of the extensive renovation of the University of Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium. Brad Zimanek, sports editor of The Post-Crescent at Appleton, was elected president for 2005. Adam Mertz, sports editor of The Capital Times in Madison, was elected vice president. The association is composed of sports editors of the 36 daily newspapers in Wisconsin that are members of The Associated Press. The Kalamazoo Gazette was the only paper to win or place in every Mid-American Conference News Association writing category (with former sports editor Paul Bowker placing in four categories and Scott Jungman in two). Bowker is now sports editor at The Times of Northwest Indiana, and Jungman is now a sports writer at Yuma (Ariz.). — Brad Zimanek
The Colorado Springs Gazette published a 10-page Frozen Four preview section the morning of the national semifinals, which included Colorado College, along with an 8-page sports section. The Frozen Four section included live stories and photos by three writers and a staff photographer from Columbus, Ohio, the day before that first game. The Gazette published a live 6-page section to tell readers about the national semifinals. Both days' papers included a significant presence on A1. The Gazette switched to a tabloid format for its three-times-a-year Peak Performers section, which honors all-area high school athletes. The Gazette continued its string of including mug shots of every all-area player as chosen by staff, varying from 50 to 135 mug shots depending on the season. The paper also redesigned the athlete-of-the-week page that runs on Tuesday to give it a bit more zip. Besides switching to a quirky Q&A format for the athlete, the page now includes a look at the top event coming that week. The Great Plains Region will holds its annual workshop July 25 and 26 at the Clarion Hotel in Kansas City, across from the Truman Sports Complex. The workshop includes tickets to a Royals-White Sox game on July 25. For more information, call Scott Dochterman at 816-271-8577 or e-mail him at scottd@npgco.com. — Scott Dochterman
When he was at his best in the office, which was always, Caesar Alsop was a guy the Philadelphia Daily News always could trust to make the sports section its best and have a good time doing it. When Caesar was at his best outside the office, which wasn't always the case in later years for health reasons, he was a guy who loved to golf and have a good time during and after a round. The Daily News sports department put the two together on May 13 to honor its former sports editor. Caesar passed away last June from heart failure at age 53. He is survived by his wife, Althea, daughter Brandy and sons Caesar and Brandon. The Friends of Caesar held a golf outing in Caesar's memory and to help finance the college education of Caesar's youngest son, Brandon, who plans to enter the University of Delaware in the fall. The Daily News would like to thank the many sponsors who participated in and made donations to the event, particularly the overwhelming support of the Daily News newsroom and friends at local papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and Wilmington News-Journal. As part of a redesign of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the sports department was handed a much larger section on Fridays and decided to rename the section SportsWeekend. The paper added a recreation sports page that includes a new column on running, as well as columns on cycling and tennis. It also added a beefed-up calendar. By repackaging some elements, the Post-Gazette was able to create a full page for motor sports, including a column on the local racing scene and a high school package that includes standings, stats, a notebook and other elements. To complement its coverage of the Phillies, Mets and Yankees, the Times of Trenton started a Baseball Page every Sunday. It is anchored by Phillies beat writer Mike Olshin's column/feature in which he looks at trends and issues. The page also features a short piece on an area minor-league player, a "trivia hot corner" and "fantasy picks of the week." The Philadelphia Inquirer sports department is making a full-time commitment to the Internet, hiring Deidre Childress as deputy sports editor/new media. Childress will be working with Internet partner Philly.com on a daily basis to manage the content that comes from sports, as well as developing new media in the paper's daily coverage. Sports editor Jim Jenks also is looking to name a full-time Internet writer to join Childress on the project. — Jim Jenks
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No report.
Bob McClellan, interim sports editor of the (Nashville) Tennessean, is leaving to take a position at Rivals.com. McClellan was also the Southeast Region Chair, so his departure means vice chair Chet Fussman, Sports Editor of the Jacksonville Times-Union, will move up to region chair. The Orlando Sentinel has started a project with some other papers across Florida and the nation called the Sports Front Exchange. Each day, the newspapers send PDF copies of their sports fronts to the Sentinel, and they are posted on a web site for everyone to view. So far, the papers that have been participating are the Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Hartford Courant, Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, Newark Star-Ledger, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and St. Petersburg Times. Right now the Sports Front Exchange resides on Sentinel deputy sports editor Roger Simmons' personal web site at www.rogersimmons.com/sportsfront, but the Sentinel is in talks to buy a domain name and have a newspaper host it. — Bob McClellan
The Southwest Region held its annual meeting on May 15-16 in Austin, with the American-Statesman playing host once again. The two-day meeting, held after the state track meet, had more than 40 people in attendance. Sunday was geared toward instruction and coaching. The first session was a "Best Ideas of 2004," headed up by Russ Goodall of the Denton Record-Chronicle. After that was a two-part drive-in workshop organized by past APSE president Paul Bowker. Bowker led the first session, which focused on the importance of coaching. Brian Hendrickson of Wilmington, N.C., then led a session on enterprise reporting with Jeff Wick of the Beaumont Enterprise. The final session of the day was done by APSE webmaster Chuck Grimes, who reprised a solo version of the "Agate for Dummies" presentation from the 2004 national convention in Philadelphia. It was a big hit once again. The Sunday night party this year featured a Texas hold 'em tournament. On Monday, the University Interscholastic League — the governing body of high school athletics in Texas — made its yearly appearance, spending a great deal of time discussing the issue of steroids in high school athletics. Kim Mulkey-Robertson, head coach of the Baylor women's team that won the national basketball championship, followed as the keynote speaker, with a frank and entertaining discussion of the Bears' season. Awards were given out at the closing luncheon. Big winners included The Fort Worth Star-Telegram with five first-place awards in the 125,000-and-up category. The Beaumont Enterprise had three firsts to lead the 20,000-175,000 category, and the Albuquerque Tribune had five firsts in the 20,000-and-under category. Goodall was elected as the region's new vice chairman. He will serve two years in that role, replacing Michael Peters of the Beaumont Enterprise. Peters takes over as the region chair, replacing Fred Faour of the Houston Chronicle, whose tenure expired at the end of the meeting. — Fred M. Faour
The Fresno Bee launched a redesign on April 3 that dramatically improved the readability of the newspaper. In Sports, the biggest impact is a revamped Page 2, highlighted by a From the Sidelines feature, a cleaner-looking Scoreboard page and the grouping of box scores with roundups. The San Francisco Chronicle's first-place award for investigative reporting in the APSE contest was one of four national awards won by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. They also were honored for their reporting on the BALCO steroids scandal with a George Polk Award from Long Island University, the Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award from Northeastern University, and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents' Association. The Sacramento Bee published a 20-page NBA playoff section, previewing the Kings' first round in the postseason. The section's theme was defense, including such features as an opponent's detailed scouting report of defending the Kings, the anatomy of a blocked shot, and a look at some of the greatest defensive teams in NBA history. The Bee also has moved the bulk of its prep results to the web, with a major reorganization of high school coverage planned for the fall. On April 10-12, the San Jose Mercury News published a three-day series on how the quest for scholarships has transformed youth sports in California and nationwide. The series — written entirely by Mark Emmons and edited by deputy sports editor Rachel Wettergreen Wilner — explored such topics as the effect of club sports on high school athletics, the disappearance of the three-sport athlete, and the ways in which earning a scholarship changed the life of one San Jose State student/athlete. Reader response to the project was prodigious; the paper ran a half-page of letters in the following Sunday's section along with a column by Mark Purdy, who described the effect of the scholarship chase on his family. The Bakersfield Californian launched its SportsMonday tab in late 2004, and readers are loving it. It was a dramatic change from its normal broadsheet Monday section. The Californian launched team-specific content pages called BlazePlus (for the Class A minor-league baseball team) and BlitzPlus (for the arenafootball2 team). Both are spinoffs of the highly successful PrepsPlus feature that's been in place for the last year or so. The Californian also launched a series of Blogs online, and the sports content there has been accepted well. When a staff columnist did a blog about Scott Gomez getting hurt here in Bakersfield while playing for the Alaska Aces in the ECHL playoffs, tons of Alaska fans loudly voiced their opinions. The paper repurposed the blog into a great in-print feature that led to more feedback from Bakersfield fans. The Californian's Page 2 is taking on a new feel and is bringing in more reader interaction. It started "Caption this photo" contests, as well as trivia contests and more interactive blog work. The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise has expanded its professional sports coverage in San Diego. The PE has begun regular home-game coverage of the San Diego Padres. With the influx of former San Diego County residents moving into southwestern Riverside County, the booming area is divided among Padres, Angels and Dodgers fans. The Press-Enterprise already provides its readers with home and road beat coverage of the Dodgers and Angels. — Larry Ames |
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