new media notes

The high school football season is set to begin in the next few week and that has me thinking about new ways to cover local sports and more importantly new ways to deliver this content. Typically we’ve stuck to the tried and true approach of sending a reporter and a photographer to some of the choice games around the area.

Friday is the de facto high school football night throughout the country. We are an afternoon paper and in addition we do not publish on Saturdays and our Sunday content gets posted late Saturday night. What this means is that our readers don’t know the local scores and highlights unless they attend the game or know someone who does. Case in point: Last year the local Catholic high school, DeSales, won the state championship. Those who weren’t able to go the game on the west side of the state (the vast majority of the DeSales faithful) did not know the outcome until we published the story online or in the paper or until they were able to contact someone connected to the team.

That hardly serves our community well. I’m hoping to change that this year and actually deliver the content when it matters most: as it is happening. We’ve got a few obstacles: financial, small newsroom, reporters that aren’t all that tech-savvy. Regardless, I think we can at least attempt some of this as a trial run and as way to show management that it is worth the effort and money.

The obvious solution is mobile reporting. The tools of the trade: mobile phone (with at the very least text messaging capablity and ideally with a camera) a micro-blogging platform such as Tumblr in combination with Twitter.

Our paper currently has a wireless contract with Unicel. Unicel has a very, very poor selection of phones. Luckily, Verizon recently purchased Unicel so my hope is that we would be able to acquire some of Verizon’s phones. My suggestion, which is relatively cheap, is the LG Env 2. It has a flip open QWERTY keyboard that would make writing quick posts from the field relatively painless.

I have the earlier LG enV and I routinely post photos to Flickr and post updates to Twitter. I can even IM via text messaging. All it requires is an unlimited text messaging package. Web browsing isn’t needed and in fact is pretty poor on these phones, so a data plan is not necessary. The photo quality is above average and it can also shoot video (lo-res but video non-the-less) for that post-game interview with the winning coach.

So what is the process? Post highlights: “Thompson just completed a 40 yard pass for a first down,” “end of 1st quarter – score Wa-Hi 10, Kennewick 7.” You could send these updates to Twitter and/or a pre-formatted blog or a Tumblr type site. Feed this to your sports page online or even to your main page. Encourage people to check in during game nights. Encourage the hardcore fans to follow your game-day posts via SMS.  After the game, grab a quick interview with the coach or a couple of players, post those the same way and your readers/sports fans will get a great feel for what happened at the game. They then can read the full recap when the story is fleshed out.