Now establishing the passing game
I got three e-mails -- between 10:07 a.m. and 11:39 a.m. today -- from different men expressing interest in more football coverage of new ACC schools. Two of them specifically mentioned Virginia Tech.
An excerpt:
Can you please explain why the News & Record continues not to provide representative nor adequate coverage of Virginia Tech while both the High Point paper and the Journal in Winston-Salem do? The Winston-Salem Journal was even forward-thinking enough to do a feature story last year when Virginia Tech rejoined its old Southern Conference brethren and became a full member of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Another:
Is it due to lack of revenue that your paper cannot give adequate coverage to the greatest conference in the country. We are fortunate to be the home of the ACC & we have many citizens working diligently to build the ACC Hall of Champions in Greensboro. How nice it would be if Alumni & visitors from Fla & New England could open your paper & see that, in case you were not aware, the Atlantic Coast Conference now extends beyond Tobacco Road. For years you have chosen to focus on the big four in NC with your sports coverage. What a service you could do for the Conference, Greensboro & your subscribers from the other member institutions if you could see your way to broaden your coverage.
We often get requests -- some quite passionate -- to write about schools outside our coverage area. (Heck, we get passionate requests to write more about schools inside our coverage area.) A fan's loyalty to his favorite institution can get intense. We respect that.
But we have to draw the line somewhere. The colleges in Guilford County and the "Big 4" ACC schools are our primary sports responsibility. As with high school sports, we juggle the number of institutions within a 90-minute drive -- more than 10 -- with our available resources. There are other in-state, non-ACC schools that demand our attention -- ECU and Appalachian come immediately to mind. We also hear from Tennessee and South Carolina fans this time of year. Unfortunately, we don't have the staff or the space to cover all of those institutions.
The fan base of Duke, State, UNC and Wake is strong. Add A&T, UNCG, Elon and the other Guilford County institutions and that's a full plate for a paper our size. Sometimes readers tell me that other newspapers do a better job covering distant schools. My observation is newspapers rarely pay much sustained attention to schools outside their region and that includes papers with much larger staffs and sports sections, such as The Washington Post.
As for the ACC, we're glad the organization is headquartered in Greensboro, but we don't believe that requires us to fully cover each of its member institutions. (In that vein, the ACC didn't consult with us before it expanded its membership.)
For the record, the sports editor, the managing editor and I each attended non-ACC institutions.
Comments (4)
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Just pull out some old Ed Hardin columns and substitue Va Tech for State, UNC, Duke, etc. Since no one can tell what the hell he's talking about half the time the column will be as relevant to VT as it was to UNC and you will have satisfied your new readership without additional investment.
Posted on September 21, 2005 8:35 AM
DB, you win the funniest comment of the day prize.
Posted on September 21, 2005 3:00 PM
The guy is the William Faulkner of Greensboro sports writers. He'll probably take that as a compliment.
Posted on September 21, 2005 4:28 PM
The solution to this is really pretty obvious...there are clearly more sports activities in this area than any newspaper could possible cover...so let's encourage fans who attend the games to post their own coverage of the games for the benefit of their fellow fans who couldn't get there.
Posted on September 22, 2005 10:55 AM