By JEFF KRUPSAW
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Where do you start when you decide you want to really go online with preps?

Panelist Greg Gibson of the Orange County Register said he has learned at least two things since receiving an online mandate from upper management a few years ago:

• 1, There is big difference between hits and page views. Advertisers want page views because there can be 8 or 9 hits per page view.

"If you generate page views," Gibson said, "your bosses will be happy," Gibson says.

• 2, You have to have original content.

"If you only have statistics and stuff from the paper, you are going to have a flat site," Gibson said.

Gibson says that www.ocvarsity.com is a "runaway nightmare."

The Register covers 89 high schools, and 79 of them play football. Each school has a home page, with links to as many as 24 sports. It's like 89 different sports information web sites, with player bios, including mug shots and statistics, rosters, schedules, etc.

Orange County is an example of a big-city newspaper (295,000 daily circulation) gone web wild, while the Fort Myers News-Press (90,000 daily) started out taking a measured approach to its online expansion.

"We didn't put every sport on the site because we wanted it to be as complete a site as possible with each sport we did," panelist Dan Deluca said.

Deluca, unlike Gibson, was hired specifically to create Fort Myers' online product.

Three years ago, Fort Myers had:

• One reporter for 14 high schools; all coverage confined to the newspaper; football as the dominant sport; box scores typed in by staff; reporters in the office answering phones, not at games.

Today, Fort Myers has:

• Expanded to covering 28 high schools (25 for football); coverage of schools in six counties instead of three; coverage of basketall, soccer, baseball and softball online as well as football; a computer program set up for push-button box scores.

One thing Fort Myers has in common with Orange County and the Northwest Herald is they all ask for cooperation from the schools they cover.

"You need their help," Gibson said.

Fort Myers goes as far as running a house ad asking individuals to fill out a bio and send in a mug shot to start their own web page.They even give schools passwords so they can input information on their own.

The Northwest Herald (40,000 daily circulation) of suburban Chicago combines the enthusiasm of Fort Myers with the inventiveness of Orange County. Original content is the key.

"You are not just a warehouse for statistical information," the Herald's David Schwartz said.

To get an idea of what these newspapers do, check out www.ocvarsity.com, www.mchenrycountysports.com and www.news-press.com.

 Back to index