The local paper here in Raleigh has basically quit covering a lot of events such as high school football since the games are over way after they print. They told me they print around 6 pm. Games start at 7:30.
Is this common in other papers/cities?
They don’t even cover local major college FB games (NC State and UNC) the next day if they are at night. For a Thursday night college game, it is not in the paper until Sat.
If you cannot cover local games the next day , what’s the point?
Do you have your paper delivered, or pick it up at the kwickiemart? Some daily papers have a very early edition which goes to rural areas and street boxes, convenience stores and the like, but I’ve never heard of a home delivery edition that goes to press that early.
it is home delivered to me a few miles from where they print. They told me flat out the games are not in the next day’s paper due to the deadline.
Are local papers in the US under pressure from loss of advertising to the internet and local broadcast media? Less advertising revenue = fewer staff, fewer print editions, less content, less timeliness. It"s a constant grumble here in the UK.
Wow. I was gonna say that’s crazy—even at our daily college paper, it didn’t get sent off to print until at least midnight, but apparently a 6 pm bedtime is not crazy unusual these days.
Our paper has a later deadline, around 9:30 I think. Which means lots of times local late games have this line in the story: “The team was leading 2-1 as this paper went to press. Check our website for the final details.”
Heck, even major papers like the Detroit News won’t have results from night games, and those are professional leagues. Used to be they wouldn’t make deadline if the game went past midnight, now I think it’s like 9:30. Which- since most baseball, hockey, and basketball games start at 7 or 7:30- means all of them.
Here’s a story explaining why the Raleigh and Durham papers get printed so early.
Bottom line: things won’t be getting any better.
It’s a vicious cycle. Sports sections are shrinking and printed earlier, which allows them to cover only early games so that the west coast games don’t get reported at all, which shrinks the coverage and makes them less worthwhile.
Newspapers are dead. In a few years we’ll be down to the Times and the Post and the WSJ and maybe a couple more. They’ll all have national editions which will be worth reading. But none will have west coast scores the next day.
It sucks. The only reason I subscribe to a newspaper is to get the local stories not covered by the Times, the Post, or the WSJ.
They will put out several editions, with different deadlines, according to the physical delivery of the bundles of papers. Private contractors will pick up the bundles of papers at the production point and haul them by truck to local distribution centers.
Just checked the Sunday Chicago Tribune, they have all the scores from yesterday except for the West Coast night games of Boise State vs Air Force and Washington vs Utah, so at least here not much has changed as far as timeliness of sports scores since the demise of newspapers
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
the Raleigh paper has a paywall that even a 3rd grader can avoid so I don’t know how they think they make money on the website.
You’re worried about high school sports in the paper?
In Canada, you can’t even get professional sports news on TV. The biggest private chain axed sports departments at every station across the country this year.
So basically, all newscasts from the stations of that group in Canada are simply news and weather?
This is a peeve of mine, as well. I still get my news from the daily paper. I’ve had a subscription to a local newspaper for just about every day of my life since my mid-teens. At one point, I subscribed to two local papers, plus the WSJ and USA Today.
My current local paper (the Washington Post) is pretty good with evening scores. If the game started at 7:00 or 7:30, it is almost always covered the next day. Games that start at 8:00 are hit and miss, and anything later than that you can forget it. Unless the Redskins are playing a night game (which start at 8:30). Then they seem to hold things up to get it in under the wire.
But I’ve traveled a lot for work and tend to pick up whatever paper is available from the closest big city. Some have ridiculous deadlines, as even afternoon baseball scores are “too late for this edition.”
On friday they ran 2 different articles on 2 NC State BB games since they could run the article on Thurs. for the Wed game.
Even funnier on Sat they ran an article that mentioned “what happens if NC State wins on Friday?” but in the same paper they noted that NC State lost Friday.
I’m more concerned with editorial quality.
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of the local paper’s sports page that happened to be laying around, and read an article about a local high school girl’s team sports victory.
I say “sports victory” because nowhere in the article, which consisted of a full column on the front page and continued onto page 2, did it actually name the sport in question. I had to figure out the sport (volleyball) from context.
The article also made what I considered to be an egregious vocabulary error, when it said the victory “avenged last weekend’s loss to [an entirely different team]” (bolding mine). Um, that’s not how vengeance works …
I used to do sports pages at a design desk that handled a newspaper with an 8:30 p.m. deadline, a second one with a 10 p.m. deadline and a third one with a midnight deadline. The first one felt so bush league. You could generally get baseball into the paper in a timely fashion, but you ended up missing out on so much. The endless parade of two-day-old game stories was pretty depressing. The second one was somewhat less frustrating. You still missed out on a ton of good stuff, but at least you had a fighting chance when it came to basketball games. The third paper was the only one that was generally satisfying to work on.
They might have 30 seconds about the hockey game on the late local news.
It’s local news, national and international news for at least 3.5 hours a day… plus the national newscast at 11.