Jim Jenks

In the few weeks since taking over as president of APSE, it has become very clear as to what my priorities need to be for the upcoming year.

There is nothing like the slap in the face from the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport survey that showed newspaper sports departments "failing" in the hiring of minorities and women. We knew we were bad, we just didn't know how bad.

Or how about the punch in the gut of having your newspaper sold twice in the span of a few days and being told your travel budget is being cut up to 50 percent and your space will be down close to 30 percent? While that is no formula for success, it is something happening at newspapers and to sports editors on a daily basis.

Diversity in our departments is certainly something we can control and should work to improve with each hire. Declining ad revenues have always been out of our control, but something we had to deal with eventually. That needs to change. As editors, we need to better understand what sells in our sections, better yet, what can sell in our sections. How can sports sections provide better revenues to our newspapers?

While the agenda is set, the details are not. But plans are being developed in both areas with the hope that after a year we are showing improvement in these priority areas.

Diversity hiring

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports survey of 305 newspapers, requested by APSE, showed sports departments "lagging in employment of minorities, with blacks holding 6.2 percent of jobs among an overall minority representation of 12 percent," according to Associated Press.

Women made up almost 13 percent of sports staffs, but that is considerably lower than the 37.7 percent of females in the newsroom.

To help sports editors in their search for qualified minority candidates, I have asked APSE Diversity Committee chairperson Jorge Rojas to work with diverse groups, such as NABJ, NAHJ and AWSM, with a goal of having APSE representation in their organizations and at their national conventions.

With assistance from these groups, APSE will look to create a database of potential hires from all of these organizations and have it be one of the first stops of a sports editor.

At the national convention in Las Vegas, APSE also has offered $2,000 toward an internship next year to help AWSM find and nurture women journalists for sports copy desks.

Revenue generation

Sports sections are filled with great content. Content that should draw the interest of advertisers and be an easy sell for our newspaper ad sales people.

Why doesn't it sell? Is it editorial policy? Is it bad sales people? Is it undesirable content?

You've heard it before, or maybe even said it yourself:  "We produced a kick-ass special section and there was not an ad in it."

"Our ad department sucks."

It is obvious when you study advertising in other media, newspapers are lagging behind. Think about it. If your local baseball team can sell something as simple as a starting lineup to an advertiser on the radio, surely there must be a way to sell something like a baseball page or a stats package without crossing that journalistic line.

Mort Goldstrom of the Newspaper Association of American agrees and will be working with APSE this year to develop workshops around the country to help sports editors better work with revenue generation in mind.

Goldstrom and his staff at NAA will show us ideas that are out there and work with us on generating new ones based on our ideas for our content in sports sections and on the Web.

In the spring, Goldstrom will ask the Virginia Commonwealth University advertising school to do a case study on one of our sections, filling it with forms of advertising that just might work. Expect that these students will challenge every aspect of our editorial integrity. And that's a good thing. It will get us all thinking, and best of all, working together.

The program will start with APSE's regional meetings later this year and culminate with the case study, general session and one or two workshops at the 2007 APSE convention in St. Louis next summer.

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Jim Jenks is the Sports Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. You can reach him at (215) 854-4545 or via e-mail at jjenks@phillynews.com.

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