Newspaper coverage

Brian Pitts does a great job for the daive county enterprise in covering baseball. he does a great job covering all the sports in davie county. the davie county enterprise sports section only covers the sports at davie high school north and south davie middle schools. jv and varsity baseball combined get an average of 4-5 pages a week. this includes pictures, and stats.

 

The Salisbury post does the best job covering high school sports and american legion baseball. That weakly wipe in Mocksville also does a good job covering the same stuff Davie county need a daily paper instead of weakly.especialy during baseball season.

 

As many times in the past I have said and I would like to stipulate here again, Caldwell County is the exception and not the rule. I think the Lenoir News-Topic does a tremendous job covering HS baseball and HS sports in general all things considered. They have two full time writers who are not originally from Caldwell County. Therefore, they don't care who is who's child. I mention only two writers because there are three teams in Caldwell County with alot of travel involved. I imagine that its amazingly difficult to work for a job that you don't know anyone involved, have any ties to and I think are grossly underpaid for what they put up with. (hours, travel, away from family, etc.)

The simple fact of the matter is they have a thankless job. No one goes up to these guys and says thank you. No one calls them up and says thanks for mentioning my child. But bet money, if something is wrong, they get blasted.

Also, I would like to add the News Topic have done nothing but help me with my pet project, Caldwell Baseball Online. (www.caldwellbaseball.com) There hasn't been a game this year that I don't have the score sheets from that they or a coach hasn't sent me and I would like to thank them all for that.

 

ONE word C lote O!

horrible atrocoius and unforgiveable PERIOD!... Actually three...

 

Our local papers do a great job of covering the (local schools) South Granville and Oxford Webb. The Butner Creedmoor News and the Oxford Ledger do a very good job. The problem is these local papers in small towns do not reach a whole lot of people outside the area if any. The big papers around here The Raleigh News and Observer and the Durham Herald only print box scores. There is no updated conference standings or stories on teams etc. When they do an article it is usually about one team and it is one and done for the year. The papers would argue that there is not enough interest to spend the time covering it. I argue that one way to build interest is to cover it. This state has outstanding High School baseball from the mountains to the coast. I see more articles on travel teams and little league than I do on High School baseball.

 

Tom Ham in Wilson is one of the best. We had him in J'ville for a couple of years (as he tried retiring to the coast). He's back in Wilson now - and they are at the advantage for it.

 

St. Pete Times is great for local sports.

The Observer, well.....never mind.

If it wasn't for this site, I wouldn't have any information.

Thanks to all who contribute.

 

I can't speak to what other papers do, but we hire "stringers" to go and cover games for us when staffers cannot. A stringer (for us think Herb White or Keith Cannon or David Coulson) is someone who is not a full time employee and is paid on a per story basis. Think of them as subcontractors.

Sometimes there's a game in Boone, like today's 4A golf regionals. Well, David lives in Boone and it's a heckuva lot easier for him to drive down the street than for me to drive to Boone and back, and ultimately it's cheaper for the paper.

If there's a game in Raleigh, same thing. Alex Bass lives there and it's easier for him and cheaper for us to have him cover that NCISAA championship than for me or Mehrtens to drive up, get a hotel, eat and all that.

As you point out, smaller papers don't have the large number of teams to deal with as we do and often don't have the amount of things we have to cover (NASCAR, NFL, NBA, etc). We are a top 20-rated newspaper nationally and serve the broadest readership of any paper from Washington's Post to Atlanta's Constitution.

We are not going to have high school baseball on the front page every day nor can we cover every one of East Meck's games with a writer and a columnist. There are 35 teams in Charlotte alone. Our task is bigger.

 

Well I hope we're not a relic yet. I think message boards and blogs are good but they (still) don't serve the broad readership that a newspaper does or will. You have to remember a good many Americans still dont' have access to a PC and many who do are not nearly as computer saavy as you all are. The generation coming up now and behind it, that includes my 5-year-old son Trey who can surf the net with the best of 'em, will surely change that.

I applaud the efforts by those on here to get out accurate info regarding their sport. I can tell you that a few of the lurkers on here are professionals like myself who may actually be using some of it.

 

OK, here's my problem. I hear you. You want baseball coverage. I talked to a mother today who wants softball coverage. An uncle yesterday who wants track.

I'd say the interest level we see and hear about says that all spring sports are about equal. Girls soccer and then softball appear to the fastest growing sports for us here. And we've got to give them all equal time.

We have to worry about track and softball and soccer. We have readers who care about those things. It'd be an easier argument I guess if baseball were outdrawing those sports 3-1 or 4-1 here like football and basketball do comparatively, but it's not the case.

I want to give everyone their fair share within the boundaries I have to work in. We don't have two pages of space for high schools each week, but I think the amount of coverage we devote to high schools across the entire newspaper (CLt Observer, Gaston Observer, York Observer, Union Observer, etc) is equal to or better than any paper in the state.