By GENE WARNICK
Sports Editor
Los Angeles Daily News

Story posted on Aug. 7, 2009

One of our staffers once asked: Why do we stay in this business?

Having to make severe budget cuts and decide who goes and who stays ... well, it's not really what we got into journalism for, is it?

Yet my answer was simple: Every morning we get to compare what we did with the Los Angeles Times, one of the great newspapers of our time.

Personally, that's still a thrill.

And that's especially true when it comes to the big events, such as when the Lakers are in the NBA Finals.

Here's how two newspapers in the same town, with widely different staff sizes yet remarkably similar space, covered this year's series:

From Randy Harvey, L.A. Times:

We, of course, put as many resources as we possibly could into the Finals.

We have two full-time beat writers on the Lakers, so they covered from start to finish, as did our NBA columnist, Mark Heisler, and two general columnists, Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers.

We also had Diane Pucin writing sports media columns when the Lakers were at home. Lisa Dillman, our Clippers beat writer, did the sports media columns from Orlando. They also coordinated guest columns from television analysts Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Chris Webber and Gary Payton.

We had two bloggers at home games and on the road. Lisa took care of our Twitter needs. Mark Medina, one of our more photogenic staff writers, took care of the needs of our local television partner, KTLA, and also shot video at home games. Our blogger shot video from Orlando.

We had coordinated our efforts with our sister paper in Orlando, the Sentinel, running columns and sidebars on the Magic in our newspaper and liking via RSS feeds to the rest of their content. They did the same for us.

One of their columnists, Mike Bianchi, also did a guest appearance with KTLA. We also partnered with the Sentinel in sending generic stories – without hometown slants – to other Tribune newspapers in Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Hartford, Allentown, Pa., and Newport News, Va.

From Gene Warnick: L.A. Daily News:

We, of course, also put as many resources as we possibly could into the Finals (although I think Randy mentioned more names than we have left on our entire staff).

We kicked off our Finals coverage a few days before Game 1 with a piece by media columnist Tom Hoffarth on the potential Van Gundy controversy (could Jeff be objective with brother Stan on the Orlando sideline?).

We had an eight-page wrap around the sports section the day of the opener, plus an A1 column from our UCLA beat writer, Brian Dohn, on whether Disneyland or Disney World is better (Dohn was well-suited to the task, as he even has a Mickey Mouse tattoo).

The morning after each game, we had four-page wraps.

For home games, we had beat writer Elliott Teaford (who works for the Daily Breeze in Torrance, one of our sister papers) writing gamers and notebooks, Ramona Shelburne writing sports columns, Jill Painter and assistant sports editor Vinny Bonsignore writing sidebars, and deputy sports editor Rich Hammond writing a short game box for A1 (score, series update, what Kobe did, etc.), and our hero-goat-quote/quarter-by-quarter analysis rail for inside the sports section.

We also borrowed former Daily News sports columnist Kevin Modesti from the metro department to write for A1. Teaford and Shelburne blogged as well, and Shelburne handled our Twitter needs.

On the road, we had just two writers: Teaford and Shelburne. Teaford wrote gamers and notebooks and Shelburne handled columns and sidebars. Because some of our sister papers have ridiculously early deadlines, Shelburne would write a feature-style column for first edition, which we'd often turn into a sidebar for our final edition.

From in front of his TV at home, Hammond wrote a short story and the game box for A1 and also handled the hero-goat-quote/quarter-by-quarter rail for sports.

We also put out an eight-page special section the day of the championship parade, which featured the sports section covers from each of the wraps, plus the rails and the boxscores.

We threw in a ¾-page charticle on previous Lakers championships, which we had planned to run in the series preview (it got bumped because of a late full-page color ad, which we gladly accepted).

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