Lacrosse vs. journalism

I spent much of last week covering the Minto Cup national junior lacrosse championship in Coquitlam.
For months, it was touch and go whether I would even bother putting in the extra time.

Since the Tri-City News ended its print newspaper a year ago to exist exclusively in the digital realm, the message from management has been to produce stories that will drive eyeballs to our website.

And according to Google Analytics, those stories tend to be about donut shop openings, crime and tragedy, like a fatal car accident or fire.

But those kinds of stories don’t happen every day.

So we dutifully go about our business trying to keep our community informed about civic affairs, as well as local social issues and events that affect readers’ lives and bring people together and hope somebody reads them.

But with analytics breathing down our necks every time we click the PUBLISH button on our website’s content management system, we’re often forced into making uncomfortable decisions about what we choose to cover and how to manage our time, based not on a story’s newsworthiness or potential impact on readers’ lives but its ability to drive page views.

A story about a community-altering development project coming before city council can take hours to develop — reading and distilling the staff report and recommendations, maybe talking to the proponent for further background and comment, watching the actual council meeting — and it might move the hit-o-meter on the website a few views.

But spend 10 minutes spinning an Instagram post about the upcoming grand opening of a new donut shop in town, bolstered with a bit of background, and reader response goes off the charts.

Maybe it was always this way in the print days.

Maybe we’d been devoting time and resources to deep stories editors deemed important to the community to fill the front end of the newspaper only to have readers fly right past them to the fluff pieces buried further into its pages. We just had no way of knowing.

Whither the sports page?

Sports coverage has been a particular casualty of Google-driven journalism.

Sports has always had a specific audience and now that we can measure exactly what it is, many publications have deemed it no longer worthy of the investment of time and manpower.

Sports reporters have become the new photographers, cast off by their employers to the unemployment lines in the never-ending purge of newsroom resources deemed expendable in the name of retaining profits.

A colleague who’s worked at the downtown daily for 20+ years has seen his sports department diminished to just three, all on orders to cover the local NHL team because they’re the only stories that move the needle on the website.

Other publications have removed the Sports tab from their website entirely.

Since being retrenched to the newsroom from the darkroom in my own career, I’ve always tried to keep sports coverage alive by doing it off the side of my desk. I think it’s one of the cornerstones of community journalism, plus it’s fun to do.

That’s meant chasing features that can be easily fit around my other responsibilities but also have a greater chance of finding readers that otherwise wouldn’t be inclined to spend time with a game report. Besides, anyone interested in the outcome of a game these days will likely already know the score and what happened by the time I can file a story about it.

That championship feeling

The only time I stray from that formula is championships.

Those are a chance to practice deadline journalism that gives readers more than they’ll ever get from an Instagram post and, with a bit of planning and precise execution, even before there is a post on Instagram.

The Minto Cup presented just such an opportunity.

After shooting the opening period of a couple of preliminary-round games earlier in the week and keeping our readers apprised with quick-and-dirty stories written from the boxscores, They achieved the expected 150 or so page views each.

But the second game of the best-of-three final would get the full-court treatment, as it could be the championship-decider. That meant getting to the arena an hour early to secure a workplace for my laptop, ensure the WiFi was in working order and create a placeholder on our CMS as well as write a boilerplate portion for photo captions to speed production later in the evening.

When the game started, I shot the first period from the concourse, then used the second period to download, process, caption and upload a first run of photos for the deadline story.

With the game still in the balance early in the third period, I again started on the concourse, then, as the result became more and more apparent, moved down to a better position to catch the immediate celebration and easily get onto the floor for the trophy presentation as well as coral a few comments for my story. The party was still in full swing when I retreated back to my workspace.

Forty minutes after the final buzzer, I had the story and first photo run up on our website, then a few more photos from the celebration about 20 minutes after that. By the time I was able to pack up my laptop to head home, it was five hours since I’d first arrived at the arena. That was on top of my full shift earlier in the day.

Was the investment worth it?

The next day, our coverage of the final peaked at the No. 2 spot in our “Trending Stories.” But it never could pass the rewrite of a cop press release about a theft bust I’d knocked offer earlier in about 15 minutes.

Even in this day of analytics-driven journalism that rewards page views more than fullsome reporting, most journalists still feel a responsibility to tell stories that are important as best we can, even to a small portion of our communities. Because all those stories taken together contribute to our sense of community, one of the most important roles local news can play.

Donut shops come and go, but community endures.