Think out the box, right now

Rappers help newspaper's Prep coverage

By MATT PEPIN
Sports Editor
Times Herald-Record (Middletown, N.Y.)

Story posted on Dec. 19, 2007

At pretty much every professional development thing I've attended in the past year, such as the APSE convention and a week at the American Press Institute, the changing times for newspapers were hammered home as the No. 1 topic of discussion, both in sessions and at the bar.

I embraced the notion of adapt or die, too. Hell, I've got to survive in this career at least 12 more years – if my son realizes his/my NFL dream – and maybe as many as 24 years.

But the changing times truly hit home the day I sat in a music recording studio this summer auditioning rappers.

We were looking for hip-hop artists to write and perform a theme song to be the intro and outro music for a video show we were planning for our new high school sports web site, Varsity845.com, and our entertainment staff recommended two guys named Magnetic and Al Amin.

Thank God I had the idea to get local music done rather than just buy rights to use something mainstream, because the rappers actually planted the seed for the name of our site.

"The 845 is where I come from ..." goes one of the lines on another track Al Amin and Magnetic were recording that day.

It's the area code for almost all of the Times Herald-Record's coverage area.

Varsity845.com was in the works long before the rapper epiphany, but that was the moment I realized its potential.

If a middle-aged newspaper geek could direct a hip-hop song, then no wild idea was out of the question.

From there we decided to dabble in all kinds of video, from our own little SportsCenter program to highlights from halftime shows. We even built a little television set inside our annex of the newsroom.

We made the site interactive, with a player of the day module that lets readers get into little voting wars. Same goes for our football picks module. And readers and my writers talk sports all day long on our message boards and blogs.

We added a comprehensive database of school sports history – which has never been compiled here – and a dynamic scores and statistics database that automatically tabulates standings and stats and posts results to each school's page.

We threw in cell phone alerts, sorted all our news better, created a trivia contest and even made Varsity 845: The Song downloadable for free. It gets played at football games some nights.

The beauty of it was the core product – some really great sports reporting by my staff – was delivered to a whole new audience. They just wanted it in the middle of a toy box – and available on demand – rather than folded over the arm of dad's easy chair.

I used to despair about our industry.

Not so much anymore.

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