Field Guide to Covering Sports. Joe Gisondi

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      Cameron Eickmeyer, USAHockey.com

      Carving a Niche

      Niche is essential to blogging. Nobody’s covering Little League in your town? Volleyball coverage at your school is nearly nonexistent? Start a blog. Even if you have a small staff, you can start a blog that covers sports in general at your university, although it might be better to break out blogs for your most popular sports—usually football and basketball.

      Dan Woike, a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times who used to cover Southern Cal for Rivals.com, says his readers didn’t care as much what was happening in the rest of the college football world. They wanted info on their team, USC. So he didn’t focus on national or league issues unless he could localize how those issues affected Southern Cal athletics.

      If a softball pitcher from Arizona State got arrested, Woike could have blogged about how the arrest could affect the Trojans’ chances in a scheduled game. He wouldn’t have to write a straight news story saying that a top-rated team had lost its top player, because other media outlets would do that.

      Though blogs don’t have stringent deadlines, most professional journalists try to post something as soon as an event concludes, adding newer details after speaking with coaches and players in the locker room. This resembles an old process in which reporters used to file quick game stories for a newspaper’s first edition and then keep revising the story for later editions through the night.

      “You have to bring the latest information as soon as you get it,” says Greg Bedard, now a senior NFL writer for Sports Illustrated. “If a reader knows you have everything first, why would they go anywhere else?”

      The Associated Press still uses this process for all breaking news, which means the wire service may send out more than a dozen write-thrus (revised versions of one story) before an editor selects the latest possible one for newspaper publication. Readers see only that final choice. With blogs, in contrast, Internet surfers can watch as a story develops and changes.

      Tips for Blogging Sports

      Individual blog posts can range from one paragraph for notes and quick updates to 1,000-plus words for features and game stories. “Not being tied to a budgeted length allows for the story to grow more organically,” Woike says. “There are temptations to get wordy at times, but really, if there’s good information, there’s always room for it.”